If your smartwatch has a feature that makes it beep when it's too far from your phone, you will never forget it again and you can resume wearing a watch.

Yes, but if a burglar comes in, the safe is probably the first thing he'll get...

Agreed. I use an alternative to all this: all my data is backed up on a small eeePC in my attic and send sent to a friend of mine through SSH. I have 1TB of data storage at his place, and I offer in return 1TB of data storage in my place for him to do the same.

Sensitive stuff is encrypted so I don't care if he can see all my files. The bulk of it is pictures/personal movies in terms of size. encfs works wonders for low sensitive data, the rest can go through TrueCrypt/keepass2 encryption or even PGP.

And it costs me zero (minus the 1TB I have reserved for him).

So ? Buy a bigger house if you don't have enough room.

I wonder if chewing bubble gum would also impact a below average student's exam scores. Seems like minimize the distractions from sex, alcohol, and cannabis would tend to help most below average students.

Also, if you can only smoke in these Dutch coffee shops, and spend all your time there instead of in your apartment or dorm, then less studying might explain away some of the exam scores.

But despite the above concerned, I think most of us all assumed that there is some cognitive impact while someone is using cannabis. The debate has always been if this is temporary or is the impact long term. I tend to find a lot of holes in research that shows the negative impact to be long term. I have a hunch that there could be some neutral impact that is long term (changes but not detrimental), but that has been rather tough to measure.

(researching comfortably from my armchair)

Google didn't, Apple did. Not one iPhone ever sold has ever been touched by a carrier before getting into the hands of the final user, where the vast majority of Android devices get crapped by carriers before they get sold.

Apple said: Carriers are crap, let's protect all of our phones (and thus users) from them.
Google said: Carriers are crap, we're going to provide users that care with phones that are untouched by them.

As always, Apple forced their views on everyone while Google offered a choice. I think Apple was right on this one.

So you don't recognize YouTube brings any value to you? Shouldn't they be able to decide how to monetize it? After all, it's their website.

As for the spamming part, I don't see as spamming if you actually willfully go there al by yourself.

There is another catch to it: I will not pay a fee to all websites I visit in order to avoid ads. Not even talking about the money spent, there is just no practical way for me to micro-pay for every site I go to... Even though I think it would be a nice way to avoid ads while still giving something to the sites I visit. After all, they provide value..

In other words: it doesn't scale until there is a way to expand the model to the internet. As such, I will still have AdBlock installed for all the other sites I visit. So even if I don't pay for YouTube, I won't see any ads anyways, making the YouTube subscription of little value.

Reference needed. There is no country on earth where police, fire, health and education systems costs 30% of the GDP. Governments want that to do all sort of stuff most members of the population don't want. This is why people try to evade taxes. Because they're spent 90% on bullshit. If my country was asking for 3% of the GDP and that was it, nobody in their right mind would try to evade taxes because they would be fair: (almost) insignificant for the people and providing quality services.

Unfortunately, this is almost not true in every country. All governments are huge ballooned administration that forever wants to gobble more money to do more bullshit, most of the time orders of magnitudes less efficiently than private companies could.

Being able to vote what gets lit next would solve a lot of debate in my circle.

entire internet -> cafe wifi -> trigger is not 20 meters and not easy to trace unless you know to look for cafe's polling HTTP or IRC or XMPP on a frequent basis.

But who says you can't tie the trigger to a facebook update? I change my profile picture and suddenly a bucket of pigs blood dumps on Carrie's head.

Well you can share it on the same system or over a network filesystem that is designed to do file locking in a unix friendly way (like NFS).

And I totally agree with other posters that RCS for /etc is a great way to go. I use it myself. (but I keep my DNS zone files in git)

in a day and age that local cell phone jamming is relatively easy, it seems like the obvious construction is to have a device that must get a text message every interval (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, whatever) or it triggers.

an cheap FM radio could be put on a frequency that is not used, and be triggered by a strong signal on that frequency (a bit dangerous, but you're a terrorist, you probably don't give a fuck), or a DTMF decoder-on-a-chip could be packed inside of the radio for a slightly more secure deliver.

Another option is a rather inexpensive RC toy, or a slightly more expensive hobbyist RC transmitter/receiver combo (not as portable as above). Range can be a few miles if you get the VHF receiver (normally required a HAM license, but terrorists wouldn't care about that)

802.11 wifi and the passwords for the coffee shops and hotels in range should do the trick and work anywhere. Plus, no need to dial in. You can have it triggered online. Welcome to the Internet of Things, where Things include bombs.

I wouldn't bother with --depth options, at that point you're better off downloading a tarball/zip of the branch. Downloading a nightly snapshot tarball is even better, because you can resume that.

I write serious code all the time without git. In other tools it was easier to avoid branching or merging by keeping the teams small and only track a "dev" branch and several release branches that are rarely updated. Apply the same patch to each release branch to avoid having to do any complicated merges between branchs. Yes it's all kind of silly and painful, but it doesn't take a long time if you avoid the weakness in other tools. Plenty of time left over to write "serious code".

The easiest of course is to not have any teammates at all. Then you can code up everything and keep it in a serious of .zip files, or RCS or do nothing at all. I use git for everything today of course, even for single developer projects. But if I didn't have git, I would simply do the extra leg work that I've done in the past.