Unfortunately, postal voting enables vote-buying.

Firefox comes with a couple of calculators built in. It has since before it was called Firefox.

MSE support isn't in Firefox 36.

The Youtube-only thing is currently being targeted for Firefox 37, and enabling it in general for 38 or 39 once the standards-compliance issues are worked out.

Half of the sample is below the _state_ average. As in, below the average of a different sample.

Ignoring average vs median issues, what this says is that folks in SV are no more likely to get their kids vaccinated than folks in CA in general are.

Even the quote Slate cherry-picked to drive their click-bait headline is innocuous. Parents *do* have a right to decide what's best for their children. That right must be balanced with public health concerns, so it makes sense to make vaccination mandatory (or mandatory-for-public-schoolers) in some cases, but surely not *all* cases as you move down the scale of public health impact. In particular there will be cases where the public interest would be served (a little) by forcing everyone to be vaccinated, but that interest doesn't outweigh the additional dilution of parental rights. That seems to be all Christie said here.

we could have lawful access... that we're prohibited from getting because of a company's technological choices.

Now you know how the public feels when they want to make fair use of some video on a DVD or Bluray.

WebRTC:
* Proper open, royalty-free standard (IETF)
* Encryption (DTLS)
* Opus CBR mode for high resistance to traffic analysis
* Standardized NAT traversal (ICE, STUN, TURN)
* Supported in Chrome and Firefox, plus other products
* Coordinate WebRTC sessions with any Web site

The funny part is, I bet HTML5Test doesn't measure what you thinks it measures...

One big problem here is that when "legitimate" services present invalid certificates, it teaches users to accept browser-provided "broken SSL" UI as a normal thing that they should just ignore. This is very harmful to Internet security in general.

Unfortunately, Stephane Charbonnier is one of the people who were killed in this latest attack. I really hope you're right that Charlie Hebdo will keep going, but it's a lot easier to recover from physical damage to offices than it is from having the staff that make the magazine what it is killed. :(

Just because it's from a reputable scientist doesn't make the response brilliant.

The argument that in a universe with different values for constants, life could exist --- just not as we know it --- is weak. Evolution requires heritable traits subject to selection pressure. A serious argument for "life, but not as we know it" needs some thought experiments suggesting how evolution could work in alternative universes, e.g. universes where hydrogen is the only element that can exist. I've read widely in this area but not found such thought experiments. In their absence, it would have been better to leave this argument out.

IMHO by far the biggest problem for the claim that life must be abundant in the universe is Fermi's paradox. Such claim must be accompanied by an explanation for the absence of evidence (not unlike many religious claims!). There are various possible explanations for Fermi's paradox, but the credibility of the life-everywhere hypothesis depends on them so they have to be made. That wouldn't fit into a short letter-to-the-editor rebuttal, which means a short-letter-to-the-editor rebuttal is not a good format for addressing this issue.

The problem here is that H.265 and by extension BPG are heavily patent-encumbered. These are not just latent patents but patents that the H.265 contributors are using for a revenue stream.

Bellard suggests "just use the licensed hardware decoder you probably already have" but a) that doesn't make technical sense in lots of cases and b) most people don't, in fact, have such a thing currently and c) the encoding situation is even worse.

Browsers are pretty complicated, yes. Things like low-latency high-performance VMs, hardware-accelerated video pipelines, plus the details, like actual HTML parsing, CSS layout, a network stack, and so forth. Also, what matters is not just the complication but how fast you're trying to change things, and people are adding new things (flexbox, more complicated CSS layout modes, mode DOM APIs, etc) faster than ever before.

But also, in addition to a browser Mozilla is working on FirefoxOS, which involves a whole separate bunch of developers, since it's not like the browser developers are writing things like the dialer app for FirefoxOS. Also, you need QA, not just developers.

And yes, Mozilla has 1000-ish employees, for what it's worth.

It's not just Mozilla. If I look at https://www.openhub.net/p/chro... I see on the order of 600 committers with commits in the last month. And that's not even counting whoever is working on the non-open-source parts of Chrome. And not counting, again, QA and so forth.

And the worst part is, this is not a new development. Microsoft had over 1000 people working on IE6 in 1999, according to http://ericsink.com/Browser_Wa...

So yes, browsers, complicated.

The "let" keyword is not the same thing as "let blocks" and "let expressions".

The keyword looks like this:

    let x = 5;

and is in ES6. A let block or let expression (neither of which is in ES6) looks like this:

    let (x = 5) alert(x);

so that "x" is only in scope for the duration of the let block. It's syntactic sugar for:

{
    let x = 5;
    alert(x);
}

> So you still have to buy an iPhone, an iPad, an
> Android phone, and an Android tablet to test on them,

Sure. The point here is to allow you to use the devtools of your choice, not to create a test environment.