There's an extension for Chrome called The Great Suspender which purports to free up resources by automatically suspending tabs when inactive for a period of time (unless they're on a whitelisted domain). It greys out the tab text/icon, unloads the page and replaces it with a "click to reload" dialogue; it basically just redirects to: chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html#uri=ORIGINAL_URL_HERE, so you'd have to remember to whitelist inactive forms and such. It doesn't reload the original pages when you start chrome until you explicitly click the reload button, too, so it helps with restarting the browser a bit faster.

Still no way to get tree style tabs in chrome, though. I miss those.

If the domain is yourname.com then hello@yourname.com or firstname@yourname.com works; the latter is probably less confusing if you have to verbally dictate it to someone (unless you just spam business cards everywhere). So saying "john at john smith dot com" is clearer than "hello at john smith dot com", because verbally saying hello mid sentence is unusual.

You can forward gmail emails to another address pretty easily, and even reply to those emails from that email address or from your primary one. It's easy to set up in Google Apps with your own domain, and probably just as simple on other hosting services (which you'll presumably use).

You are possibly discounting the popularity gained by the artist through the label's marketing efforts; a random person starting to sell music online without a prior history of some level of marketing would probably experience a significantly different response.

Remarkably, not everyone on this planet wants to spend all of their movie-viewing time on art-house pieces with complicated themes; sometimes you just want to be exposed to a universe that hadn't existed previously in your imagination, whether it's a reworking of an old story or not. Same as a good chunk of the population doesn't mind some McDonalds every now and then; sometimes you just want a cheap burger.

Term limits aren't necessarily a good thing, as they're going to encourage politicians to look for places to be employed once they're finished with their term (as a primary focus for the entire term). They also reinforce short-term thinking, as the individual politicians won't need to deal with the fallout of their decisions if they have no chance to be re-elected. Finally, the networking and experience required to get anything done in any political environment takes quite a while to build up – if you replace people at too high a rate they'll never reach the efficiency stage, which may or may not be a bad thing depending on your views.

Most simple solutions are horribly flawed, which is often the main reason they haven't been employed previously. Cutting taxes isn't likely to help much with paying off the 21 trillion dollar debt, for example, unless new taxes on richer people are introduced.

So you hire them for their predicted future ability, train them to acquire that ability, then let them loose on the bull (or production code). The analogy sort of makes sense, when you think about it too much.

Broader privacy implications aside, it's actually kind of neat to be wearing a device which can identify when you're in a particular space and how long for. We have a volunteer tech group working on projects at our local museum and one of the guys implemented a fitbit scanner to identify when people were present and how long for (which is useful, as bureaucracy dictates we sign in/out for fire and visitor-tracking reasons). Every few minutes it broadcasts a request for fitbits, and all those within range respond. They return a mac which can be linked back to a fitbit account, if the user has authorised us to access it, which makes it a bit easier to identify the person who owns the fitbit. We could probably replace it with another sign in system, but passive is kind of neat when you want it.

I assume resolving the identifying problem wouldn't be as easy as using a random mac?

As is typical for politicians of his breed, he only needs to be seen to be trying to implement an Internet filter. He doesn't need to pass it to be seen to be doing something by those people he's trying to win votes from, and if he doesn't succeed he'll be able to rally them again next election and win their votes. Failing to create a workable solution and being able to blame the European Union is probably highly beneficial to him, politicially.

In Australia, at least, anyone can apply to vote by mail (which is very useful for the elderly or super-busy), and voting by mail is the only way to vote in things like local council elections. Voting is also compulsory. It seems to work fairly well; I've never heard of a vote-purchasing scandal, and any amount of vote purchasing which was on a large enough scale to influence an election result would be almost guaranteed to be leaked by somebody.

Every vote counts, for sure, but when your potential voting population is in the millions it'd become very difficult to cover up a vote-at-gunpoint scheme from the police. Similar with voting for cash, the chances of being able to conceal such a scheme–if it grows to a size where it can influence the outcome of an election–are small. The lack of needing to visit a polling station should also increase the number of people voting, which may work to counter-act the influence of the small number of votes which are compromised without alerting police.

It's a massive hole on paper, for sure, but it remains to be seen whether it would actually result in any visible influence if it were enacted in practise. A much more effective way to purchase votes seems to be buying a news-media outlet–and it's legal to boot.

A very large portion of Vista's negative perception was directly related to crashes resulting from Microsoft altering the driver model and requiring hardware manufacturers to produce new drivers to support it; the new drivers were buggy and crashed a lot. They didn't backport DirectX 10 to XP because of the driver model changes (well, probably more for business reasons, but that's the technical excuse they used). Graphics driver crashes don't take out the system as much now, either, as they can be caught and have the device reset where XP would produce a bluescreen. Clearly it changed.

Maintaining multiple UIs is messy, and the overwhelming majority of users will remain with the defaults. If you've found a way to make something better (preferably verified with some user experience designers), changing the defaults makes sense. If only a small portion of your users change the defaults (even with things like Ubuntu I suspect the number of people actually bothering to customise Unity is quite small) then it doesn't make a lot of business sense to focus resources on them when you could focus more on the majority.

Console games are developed to run very well on a single piece of hardware with well-known specifications. What works on the Xbox's AMD processor and GPU with unified memory won't necessarily translate easily to an Intel CPU with nVidia graphics card and separate memory, particularly if there are a lot of hacks in place that take advantage of specific instructions or the layout of memory to perform tasks more efficiently. There's a tonne of effort involved in reorchestrating the control scheme and UI for PC as well; Skyrim's PC UI suffered from console-itis pretty badly.

There's usually some strong reasons for why things are the way they are.

You mention most regulated and less regulated, but Uber are promoting unregulated. The bill in question seems to be "less regulated" than taxi services. You may also be dramatically overestimating your ability to resolve a situation with an unstable driver; sane and intelligent human beings use services which have enforced minimum standards of safety.

The US has a lot of places with homeowners associations that prohibit clothes lines, apparently, as they find them unsightly, so dryers are the only option I suppose. Sounds a bit like the Australian politicians who don't want wind turbines because they'd be able to see them from their properties. Bit silly, but hard to avoid.

It seems like any media format with a wide enough viewing audience falls under pressure to implement content filtering; that Facebook happened to do it early on is unremarkable. Tumblr tried to do it sometime in the last year or two and was subjected to a fair whack of backlash, but they'll try it again sometime soon. The "Family Friendly" label is quite valuable, it would seem.