It's not really just about annoying the neighbours. If you stick all the poor people in the same neighbourhood, then all the poor kids will go to schools with poor kids, and all the rich kids will go to school with rich kids. Since schools are funded by property taxes, the poor kid schools always end up having less money. If you mix poor and rich kids in the same areas, and they attend the same schools, and benefit from the same property taxes, then things end up much more even. Instead of one school having everything, and another having nothing, you'd have all the schools with similar amounts of resources.

Personally, I think that Minecraft needs a lot of work. The gameplay itself is pretty good, but it really needs to be reworked in terms of performance and stability. I was hoping that things would change with MS buying it as they could hire more people to work on it, but I don't think they've actually done anything noteworthy with it yet.

Well, the kid was only 2 years old. You could presumably clone them and the kid would just be reset at birth. Sure, the kid would have a different personality because of different life experiences, but the kid should look pretty much the same. This brings up a good point. Why try to cryogenically preserve such a young child. It's not like they have any idea about what is actually going on. If you were able to revive them, they wouldn't have much of a recollection of their previous life. Most people don't remember events from when they were 2 years old.

Exactly. When Google Reader was shut down, I switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. I didn't want to just go to some other system that I didn't control and that would end up being changed or closed in a couple years. Now I have a system that works, and I don't have to worry about someone else shutting it down. As long as I can find a hosting service with Apache and PHP, it will work for me.

Why so many though? What are the politicians doing if the people have to vote on everything anyway? Isn't the whole point of electing a representative so that they can represent you. How can a voter possibly be expected to be informed on who is the best candidate for dozens of different positions in government?

If you haven't already, read An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth, but Chris Hadfield. Amazing book. It gave me a new found respect for NASA, the CSA, Roscosmos, and everybody else who helps make space exploration possible.

The biggest problem with designing an electronic voting system is how the voter and election officials are supposed to verify that it's running the correct system on election day. Let's say they did develop a perfect system that was proven to work. How do I verify that said system is even running on the computer when I walk up to it on election day? It could be any system that just shows the proper screens to verify that it is a legitimate system. The only way for me to be sure that my vote was counted correctly would be to be able to check later on some secondary system, which would remove the secret ballot feature.

Compare this to a paper ballot system, where everything is completely transparent. I can watch them seal the empty box at the start of the day, watch my ballot go into the box, and then watch all the ballots be counted at the end of the day. It's easy enough for a 10 year old to understand exactly what's happening. There is very little ability to mass game the entire system. You might be able to put a couple extra votes in a few boxes, but it would take a huge conspiracy to vastly shift the vote across multiple polling stations. With voting on computers, it could be done quite easily.

I love the Canadian paper voting method and I hope it never changes. However, there are some differences between the Canadian System and the US system. In Canada, we usually only have one thing on the ballot. Either it's a federal election and you vote for your MP. If it's a provincial election you vote for your MPP. If it's a municipal election, there maybe be three things you can vote for, like mayor, city councillor, and school board trustee. But that's about as complicated as it gets. Compare the US election ballot with a Canadian election ballot. You could see why they might want to use a computer so they can lay things out a little more clearly. Ask one question per screen and it becomes a little less daunting. However, I think that if they are going to use computers to make the voting easier, it should really just be used to enter and print out your ballot, which is then deposited into the ballot box and counted manually.

Really though, I don't think computers should be used at all. I've heard too many stories of polling locations not having enough machines and people having to wait hours in line to vote. The greatest part about the Canadian system is that It's never taken me more than 10 minutes to vote, and I've never had to travel more than 10 minutes to vote. I usually just stop by on my way home from work. I once lived in a highrise apartment that had it's own polling station. They basically have one in every school. It's so effortless. And yet we still don't have enough people voting.

Not sure when they implemented this, but it never got backported to my phone. The again, I'm still running Android 2.3. My phone was released 6 months for Android 4 came out and I never saw an update. You can blame the manufacturer (LG), but I also blame Google as well. They allowed their name to be engraved on the back of the phone. The current status with Android updates is appauling. I'm getting a new phone soon. Apple is too expensive, and I'll probably get Android. But this time I'm not going high end. I don't expect any updates this time around. Whichever phone I choose it will probably be one that I won't be so expensive that I can replace it in 18-24 months.

I very much agree with this. I know a guy who's trying to build something, and he insists on 3D printing screw threads. It makes much more sense to use a tap and die, but he insists that a 3D printer is good enough to make threads, even though the parts he's printed do not fit well together at all.

The Moto G is exactly the one I had in mind. These phones offer great value for your money. Especially when you consider that a lot of the high end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S6 and iPhone don't even have an SD Card slot. Your $700 phone now just became even more expensive if you want more than the base amount of storage. With the slow or non-existent roll-out of updates on Android phones, buying a new phone ever year is probably a much better plan if you want to stay up to date on the operating system. I agree that the high end phones are somewhat better, but not so much better that they justify such a large price tag.

I really wonder how long people will continue this trend. Currently, I see a lot of people with not a lot of money buying high end phones like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S# phones. These phones are quite expensive, and the cheaper ones are getting to the point where they are actually quite good. Why spend $700 for a phone when a $200 phone will do everything you need. You could get a new one more than 3 times as often at that price. So if you usually get a new phone every 2 years, then you could get a new phone every 8 months if you went with the cheaper model.

This was a big issue when I was looking at tablets a year or so back. There were a few models with 2560x1440 resolution, but most of the reviews were not great, as games and other graphic intensive activities didn't run smoothly. Meanwhile, the tablets that stuck to 1080p were much smoother when used with the same processor. I imagine a 4K phone would suffer from the same problem. Trying to display so many pixels is going to be taxing on the processor, and draining the battery. On a 5.5 inch screen, nobody is going to notice the difference. Also, as far as I'm aware, Android lacks the functionality to be able to run at a non-native resolution. On a Windows or Linux computer, you could always tell it to run in 1080p (as 4k is exactly 2 times the resolution of 4k), and only render in 4k when it really matters. Android seems to want to render at native resolution all the time.

I agree. I think there although there are lots of people in America without money, there is also quite a few people with ample spending money. A graduate from a good university in a field with good jobs could easily earn $75,000 a year. Let's assume that the person is married to somebody who also went to school and can earn $75,000 a year. Together, they make $150,000 a year. That's a lot of money. Unless you are living in extremely expensive areas like Manhattan or San Francisco (in which case the two people will probably be making $200,000-$300,000 combined), then you should have plenty of money to spend on whatever you want.

Netflix has a couple huge advantages. First, they don't have t worry about censors. They can put whatever they want in the show and Nobody can say a thing. Network TV can't do that. Also they don't have to think about how long an episode is. Obviously they want the episodes to be within a certain range, but they don't have to choreograph the entire episode into exactly 42 minutes so they can fit it into an hour timeslot with all the required commercials. Also, with commercials, most shows write with the expectation of commercials at different points throughout the show. Netflix doesn't have to do that, and helps the shows be a lot better. I find you see HBO and other pay TV shows with content that is just as good, but they can do most of the same stuff Netflix can.