I'm not sure how being a well educated corpse will have helped ;)

Bah, we have more than enough time to work out a fix for that one! Let's work on immortality for me and then maybe rising sea levels or something, we'll get to that one in a few million years.

There are many full time employees working for the Mozilla Foundation. It's not exactly a bunch of people doing it in their spare time for the love of open source at this point. I assume it's going toward paying for operation costs and maybe some new project/ideas.

I mean, sure bury a time capsule on earth, it's cool for the kids and stuff and we can all reminisce about the good old days when you open it up but it just seems like such a waste to send one all the way to the moon as a PR stunt.

It gets worse when they explain it, it sounds like a scam: "His idea is to charge people £50 or so to place a sample of their DNA, in the form of a strand of hair, in an archive to be buried on the moon,..."

And then: "The catch? He needs at least 10 million earthlings to do this if he's to generate the £500 million the moon shot will need."

I mean, I'm sure you can chop up strands of hair pretty finely and he probably doesn't plan on generating £500 million through the time capsule but you can only fit so many of them on a moon probe while keeping costs realistic. Just from an engineering point of view, imagine trying to chop up 50 000 hair strand as finely as possible. Do you A: Develop a machine to do it / B: Rely on people to chop them and do their best to make the smallest possible cut. Then don't even get me started on the really careful manipulation involved to not lose one of those super small cut of hair.

I'd say it was more about price point than complexity. Its free and good enough vs expensive and full featured.

Well yeah, but that's only because you guys come from a place where it seems to be the norm to be married. Here almost all couples my age just throw a wedding after 6-7 years because it something fun and it wouldn't change much at that point. Many don't even bother.

This got me thinking and I consulted Stat Canada website. I realized that in my own country ( Canada ) my own province was a major outlier. In 2011, almost 38% of all couples were common-law couples ( meaning they just live together, not married ). The married couples were mostly an older demographic where marriage was still a thing. It's worth noting that the Canadian average for common law couples in other provinces was around 15% and we're almost exactly following the Canadian average for single parent families at 16%, so it doesn't seem to impact us negatively.

Source : http://www12.statcan.ca/census...

I'm saying this seriously: Where you live, a wedding band would make breastfeeding seen in a better light?

Maybe it's because I come from a country where weddings are something you do just for fun after a few years and a couple of kids but it kind of gave me a culture shock that people in other places would actually have the ingrained habit of checking if a woman with a baby has a wedding band. I mean, heck, I know a lot of guys don't even wear their wedding ring because it's annoying when you're not used to it ( I know it took me a while to get used to wearing a ring ) and no one really raises an eyebrow.

For pretty much all people in tech I've worked with, yes it doesn't matter really. No one gives a fuck if you're gay, poly or whatever.

However, outside of the tech world, I've had to deal with plenty of people who are still disgusted by gays or get angry about the whole gay marriage thing. Let's not even get into what happen to that gay kid in high school when you live in a small rural towns. I've seen it when I was in high school, I still hear about it from younger teen, I've recently seen a father disavow his kid because he was gay. I could go on and on and I'm not gay, so I can't imagine the horror stories a gay person would've to tell, of growing up in a small rural town.

Those are not the droids you're looking for :).

I agree with you, in Canada it's basically the same. We're not allowed to do background checks unless it's a job require like daycare, higher level accounting positions, etc. For example if I hire an engineer, QA guy or sound artist it would be right along there with asking a women if she intends to be pregnant soon ( which hilariously enough I understand is legal in many states ).

Her campaign is for girls' rights to education, pretty sure she doesn't care if people go to coed schools or separate and whether it's private or public.

Plus I'm just taking a guess but there's probably security issues that are easier to handle in a private all girl school. She was shot point blank 3 times for her views after all, I wouldn't exactly feel 100% safe even if I was in the UK.

I agree that currently, objectively even if it's uncomfortable to have the government read and log all my electronic communications I'm not *currently* hugely worried about it. I'm much more worried about thieves, etc.

The problem is what's going to happen moving forward? The logical end game, is total surveillance of everything electronic/physical ( with cam, image recognition ) where the police comes knocking on your door because your phone GPS logs and CCTV show that 2 months ago you were in a house that's just been busted for being a drug dealer den. It's all automatic, they just had to tell the datamining tools to flag every single person that came in and out of that house since the drug dealer moved in 4 years ago.

I would like to say it's alarmist and stuff but for example where I live in Canada, Cop cars now have automated license plate scanners. It's all tied to your police file, DMV, ticket, etc. If *anything* is out of order like unpaid plates, broken tail light 2 days ago that you needed to repair, etc it's going to popup a warning that they should check you. I was pulled over ( rightly so ) because I was 2 days late on my driver license, the cop car just happened to be parked on the side of the street and when I drove by it signaled that a car ( with picture ) just drove by with an owner that hadn't renewed his driver license on time. The next step of this, is already in the works,it's going to be total surveillance of all car plates all the time. It's nothing ground breaking but I know where I live it's being worked on, we have a shitload of camera everywhere to monitor traffic, it's just a natural extension of that. They'll just signal in somewhat real time the position of a car the cops want tracker and I imagine at some point they'll extend it to unpaid license plates and stuff. Obviously that system works mostly in urban areas. I can't find the news article about it, but I read about it almost a year ago IIRC.

It's a bit flawed as an analogy because the soldiers things probably won't happen to you. On the other hand, current surveillance is automated and they automatically break down all the doors to take a peak, just in case.

That's a very US centric view. We as Canadians have a different approach to government and how we want to build our society. We're more like european countries with Free School for all, Free Healthcare for all, lots of social services and support for our vulnerable population. The term "free enterprise" is not something I think I've heard *once* in my life from a politician here. We frankly don't make a big deal about the "sacred invisible hand of the market".

An aspect of this, is the government spending a LOT of money developing artists, book/movie production houses, etc. This conflict between Netflix and the CRTC is tied to that. Other broadcaster have to chip money into the pot for, yes, our socialist approach to fostering local arts. Many Canadians *support* this idea and we're not too fond of an American company trying to wreck the system of local content production.

Except that we're the second largest market for Netflix, that would be a lot of revenue streams evaporating overnight, they're not going to give that up. Frankly, Netflix Canada is so empty of recent content ( and even old one ) that it wouldn't be much of a loss.