Okay. Voting machines with a miscalibrated screen, coupled with a dumb user interface that causes wrong choices to be made and doesn't allow the voters to be certain what they voted for.

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*facepalm*

OF COURSE it's a frigging Obama conspiracy! I mean, Obama did Hurricane Sandy, messing with a few voting machines is easy in comparison, right? Duh.

Seriously, though, this is kind of like an inverse of the common-sense conclusion. Normally, one flaw is a glitch, two is a conspiracy. In voting machines, one election with screwy results is enough to suggest a conspiracy, but when all elections that use voting machines have more or less screwy results, maybe that suggests that the technology just isn't there yet.

3. People who thought studying Economics is nothing but underwater basket-weaving thought "damn, I wish I had actually studied underwater basket-weaving instead".

The DVB standard, which is used in digital broadcasting almost everywhere except North America, still supports teletext. It's just that some of the most commonly used features, like subtitles, have made their way into separate features.

So the font itself is under Creative Commons Attribution. Not bad. But then:

...in other words, it's simultaneously just an Attribution license, with a tacked-on Non-Commercial clause aside of the common CC licence.

It's not a standard licence, which adds another layer of complications. And because it has a commercial distribution prohibition, it's definitely not an "open source" project.

If you use Creative Commons licenses, go with the strictest license that describes your project to avoid unnecessary confusion. If you have a non-commercial clause, use the NC variants of licenses! Because nothing infuriates people more than seeing "it's under CC licence with no NC clause, cool" and then discovering that the actual license does prohibit commercial use to some extent.

It's for the cover-up project! You need a Ruby on Rails software project to get donations these days. ...or maybe not RoR these days. Node.js, then. Gotta be trendy. Just make sure you add enough obscure dependencies that no one can be bothered to actually install and run your project. Then watch the money roll in!

Because I really couldn't care less about all of the "power" features? All of the "power user" tools worth their salt are CLI tools, anyway.

X11 is a system that lets you display applications in windows. Gnome just happens to do that, reasonably conveniently, and doesn't look half bad. Gnome 3 shell is perhaps a bit dumbed down and not particularly powerful, but it gets its job done. The reason I'm not using a lighter desktop environment is that Gnome 3 is also a reasonably modern choice, so I won't be having headaches about applications being dumbfounded by WindowMaker's peculiarities (or the other way around).

X11 is also a system that lets you show a ton of xterms at once. Gnome just calls those Gnome Terminals. Simple enough.

All I usually really need to do to get through my day are Firefox/Iceweasel, Emacs, and some graphics/video apps (MyPaint/GIMP/Inkscape/Blender/Synfig/Kdenlive). And then there's mpd for playing music in nicely Unixy way.

Zzzzzzz... huh? Oh, it ended already? Okay, that wasn't so bad. Oh wait, the entry has tags...

Oh, so "Bottomfeeder" is still a respectful term? As I understand it, lawyers are no longer allowed to call other people "scumbags", because that technical and accurate term is no longer considered politically correct. "Bottomfeeder" is still okay, though?

My first thought was "Gee, they're using 'democrat' and 'republican' keywords - I wonder if they're making use of Conservapedia's Best New Conservative Words? Andy Schlafly has already charted this linguistic ocean, and obviously every scientist should follow his superior conservative insights! ...and they probably should only use conservative terms, because 'republican' terms may include RINO terms."

So people buy gaming hardware, and then play F2P games that... don't actually utilise the hardware to run games, but for other purposes?

Consider the alternative: firing up a Bitcoin miner on background and running some other game that doesn't require a sophisticated GPU. The gamer can keep the profit all to themselves. The only upside is that the mining company can give the gamers different games. But the fundamental problem is that people think they're buying gaming hardware, you're saying they have gaming hardware... while downplaying the fact that they're not actually using the gaming hardware for gaming at all.

Ye gods, it's like 1999 again, people get venture capital for only slightly retarded business plans

Funny. I opened up a prominent Finnish technology news site that seems to worship the ground upon which modern-time gadget makers walk on - sure enough, no mention of Tramiel yet.

Open up the news from the national broadcasting company? Boom. That's in the foreign news section, so that's fairly prominent. Dennis M. Ritchie's death was relegated to the "science and technology" section. Oh boo hoo.

(Yes, they covered Steve Jobs too. Who didn't?)

I was only half-heartedly hoping Tramiel's death would be reported in national news, but I was not surprised that they actually did that. Commodore computers were pretty damn popular here back in the day.

I have a G+ profile, but I don't post that much there.

If they'd just let me stick the RSS feeds from my blogs there, the profile just might be a little bit more useful, you know? Simple and effective. (Perhaps even integrate to Google Reader somehow. Let people see what I post. Let people see what I liked.)

Wait, such a brilliantly obvious idea is not patentable and Facebook already bought FriendFeed. *sigh*

Yeah, I thought the same. XBL purchases come out of your MSPoints wallet, which is (logically enough) stored in XBL, not the console - you can purchase stuff through the xbox.com website too, and stuff gets downloaded when you turn the console on again. Credit card info is stored on XBL too, as far as I can boundlessly speculate. Wouldn't make much sense to store it on the console, especially since the XBL account is not tied to a specific console.

However, as far as I can tell you can have multiple 360s logged in at the same time, and the console stores authorisation cookies, not passwords; you can change the Windows Live account password and the console will still happily log you on. You can change your privacy settings to only allow your One Holy Console(tm) in without passwords. Still, theoretically, you could (somehow) let your hard drive slip to someone else, thus allowing them to log in as you, and have someone charging stuff for your credit card, but all those points would go to your account anyway. All the more reason to set the password asking on.

Yeah, all he says is that as long as gay people accept that God created them as abominations, they can continue to exist in the abominable state and not be totally nuked off the face of the planet collectively. Totally not homophobia.

And I don't have an Android device.

Way to go! Get us excited about an awesome new service that does everything we've ever wanted, then tell me that basically it does nothing. Just because you live in a country the big media people forgot. And not some third-world country either - a perfectly normal and highly technological European country. Birthplace of the Android kernel, by the way. This is how they repay us?

I usually have nothing but good things to say about Google, and I know that for many parts this stuff is not really their fault, but god damn this stuff is always depressing.

</bitterness>

If some special interest group wanted to influence law this way, the bigger question would be how they would keep a lid on it once they start bribing people. Remember, this is a country with very little political corruption, or at least that's the public perception - the last time we had to start asking questions about unclear sources of campaign fundings, it really hit the fan in the media.

So I believe someone would notice if random citizens were handed money for supporting an initiative. Since this is (as far as I can tell) a publicly documented process, it'd be even harder. And, besides, what would these special interest groups do if a counter-proposal sprung up, and people were supporting it without monetary incentives?