Isn't that what NY's argument was here? Let's agree to do something to reduce the health care burden by "working together" to reduce the impact of gigantic sugary drinks?

Attempting to limit the problem of unplanned pregnancies by increased focus on planned parenthood is an awesome idea. I'm just not sure how different it is, conceptually, to trying to limit the problem of obesity/mass sugar intake/etc by limiting the size of sugary soft drinks - which I think is a stupid idea. Just not sure how I can reconcile those feelings.

FWIW, I have several friends that ride bikes. None of them are the sort of people that I would classify as the type that would do something just out of some sort of inferiority complex.

They uniformly tell me that they see loud pipes as a critical safety measure to make drivers aware that they're there.

I do not know if drivers in general (i.e., around the world) are uniformly bad at paying enough attention to notice riders (of bicycles or motorbikes), but certainly here (Brisbane, Australia) people seem to be pretty woeful at their situational awareness when driving.

For me, that is enough to keep me off the road on a bike. I don't even like driving much (my car was new in ~2004 and now has ~38,000km on it).

One of my motorobike riding friends was recently hit by a clueless driver while on a bicycle.

tldr: enough drivers are so bad at being aware of what is aorund them that loud pipes help make riders safer (... or at least, feel safer. I don't know if there is data showing that they are).

But that can happen anyway, right? Presumably doctors change what insurance they accept at certain times depending on what market conditions exist and how they go with the various insurance companies they have to deal with?

That actually makes me wonder if that would be a more efficient way of making it stop. Instead of trying to brake, deploy some surfaces that give lift and just point straight up, pop some parachutes and deploy some landing bags.

I'm sure trying to make it aerodynamic enough to do that would just be massively complicating the whole design to the point that it is worthless, but it'd be a fun way to stop.

This is dumb. They have made the a car that is a tech status symbol like nothing else. Ferraris are unaffordable to all but the super rich, but a Tesla ticks off so many boxes it's not even funny:

- super cool? tick
- eco-friendly? tick
- high tech? tick
- way more expensive than average? tick
- genuinely, actually not a piece of shit? tick

I can't justify buying one at the moment (Australian living in the USA temporarily) but every time I see one here I am struck with lust, and I don't even give a shit about cars. I just /want/ one.

The best way to use these committees would be to have them shut down the stupid situation that allows them to exist in the first place.

Like Lessig is doing with Mayday PAC.

How is this not a thing with a reality TV show already?!?

Great stuff. This news seems great and look forward to seeing where it goes, particularly around the open sourcing of some new tools.

We've just launched a new virtual server hosting service in .au which uses Ceph for the storage system (blatant plug: https://binarylane.com.au/ coming to the US soon!) We chose it after a lot of evaluation of various other systems and so far it seems to be performing really well.

The stuff on the roadmap you mentioned sounds awesome as well.

This is one of the reasons I have not bought into the Amazon ecosystem.

GP is right - Amazon have largely solved piracy for the majority of users by simply making it way easier. As an avid reader and someone that has been almost exclusively reading e-books since about 2005, I love the idea of the Amazon ecosystem.

But I can't bring myself to buy a book that I then don't own. I understand the revoking is, when considered as a percentage of books, tiny - but the point is /it can happen/. I don't want their DRM scheme to magically deactivate my book collection one day.

I know I can buy the books and strip the DRM - but then I'm back at the start and it's no longer easier to use the Amazon ecosystem. Users might as well just pirate it to - as usual - get a superior product.

I made the decision to not buy DRM'ed products ever a while ago. Unfortunately this greatly limits my ability to buy e-books - many publishers/retailers don't clearly distinguish between DRM-free and DRM on their sites, despite apparently supporting them both (I still haven't figured out how to reliably buy DRM-free Tor books; I don't know if I am stupid or what).

Actually after using FF29 for a few hours I am finding it really frustrating - I feel like I used to be able to easily glance at my other tabs to find the one I was looking for.

Now they all sort of gel together and are less 'distinct'. Maybe it's a weird "I'm not used to it yet" thing but I feel like having lots of tabs open is a little more confusing now than it was before.

Maybe they did some usability studies where they measured tab-finding-response-time and after a bit of use it got lower? Otherwise I can't figure out why this change exists.

The short answer:
- add-on bar has been removed
- ability to move tabs below ("browser.tabs.onTop") address bar is gone
- address bar cannot be moved when customising toolbars.

Classic Theme Restorer seems to fix most of these problems.

I love Firefox and have used it for years. I've put up with all the updates and changes and ridiculous behaviour since they started this rapid development cycle.

There's been some improvements. But every couple of releases my plugins break because they've removed some functionality or changed something. I can put up with that; software changes and needs maintenance.

This is the first upgrade I've done where my interface has been changed this significantly.

The Add-on bar is gone. Can't replace it without an extension. I have (well, had) tools in that I used daily.

Tabs now on top. Can't move them back to the bottom. Here's a two year old Bugzilla filled with people pleading that it remain an option.

There appears to be extensions to fix all this. But what's the fucking point any more? I'm sick of fighting to keep Firefox looking and working like Firefox if all they're going to do is take away the things that I actually use it for. It's just too much effort.

Mozilla, you used to be a leader. Now you're a follower. I know so few people that are still using Firefox - most people I talk to are surprised that I don't use Chrome - why are you going out of your way to alienate those of us that are left?

The customisation isn't flexible enough - I can't move some of the objects (like the address bar) or move tabs to the bottom where they used to be. My interface has been completely reworked with no way to restore it to what it was, as far as I can tell.

A 0-day for Adobe Flash was also patched today.

For some reason I had three different and separate updates I had to do to fix this:

1) Chrome automatically updated something and was running the latest version when I checked

2) The plugin that Firefox uses only seems to look for updates when I reboot. I found this guide to trigger the update manually, which basically then resulted in it just opening a browser window & making me download an update .exe.

3) Even after that, IE still reported running the older version. I ran Windows Update manually and discovered there was an separate patch in there for Flash for IE.

Pretty awesome.

Thanks for the reply.

I've actually been working on a deployment script for our service (we have a VPS hosting business in Australia), which gets most of it up and running in a single-click-deploy kind of way ( https://www.binarylane.com.au/... if you're interested).

It still needs some work (haven't set it up with Nginx, yet) but I had a few people interested in trying it and this meant they could have it up and running in a few minutes to tinker with.

I'll have a think about it - as a VPS provider I am really big on the idea of "private cloud" stuff and I'd really like to make things like this simple for users so they can easily deploy stuff without having to become Linux sysadmins.