It's all relative. Compared to my "home" in Australia, all of South Africa is dangerous, but compared to Afghanistan it's pretty safe. Joburg and Cape Town are pretty similar in the scale of things.

It's a joke, and possibly in poor taste, but it shouldn't be marked flamebait. Carjacking really is an everyday occurrence in South Africa. My friend's daughter always carries a .44 when driving to work in Cape Town, as she needs something big enough to pull when people point a gun at her. Note that it's "when", not "if" - it happens every few months. Between that and the taxi wars (drivers shooting at other taxis for working their turf), Cape Town can be a pretty scary place to drive. But people will always joke about their misfortunes.

I live in a community-centric suburb in Sydney's inner east. Rushcutters Bay Park is everyone's backyard. The kids play there, we run and play soccer there, we bust out musical instruments and dance. We're considerate and social because we have to be, and we're a stronger community for it. I walk home from work (about 3.5km), and I can easily pick up groceries on the way. My wife can walk three minutes to the local supermarket to pick something up, too. There's a bus stop literally in front of our building, it's six minutes to walk to the railway station. It's a good place for a family.

No it isn't. It's normal latency from this part of the world. Here in Australia, which is a bit further away again, I get average ping time of 310ms. There's a lot of fibre and numerous repeaters along the way. That all drives up propagation time.

Tiger -- OSX 10.4 -- was released in 2005 and was a great update. Two of the biggest features were Spotlight (an every day usage feature) and I believe the Dashboard.

Switch from SystemStarter to launchd was definitely a massive improvement, and there were improvements in other areas but it isn't all rosy. Tiger introduced bugs in Finder copy code which could result in not all files being copied when you copied multiple files between disks, and no notification that the copy hadn't completed successfully. To make it worse, moving multiple files between disks could result in not all selected files being copied to the destination, but all files being deleted from the source. This was fixed in 10.4.2 IIRC but it should never have made it to a production release. Tiger also changed the disk image framework to always report images using layout NONE as having invalid checksums. Apple Mail in Tiger replaced standard MBOX message storage with proprietary ELMX format, and MBOX export was broken so message boundaries didn't work for certain message content. Storage formats for Address Book and iCal were also fucked with in unpleasant ways.

Leopard -- 10.5 -- was another good release. In addition to full x86 support, Leopard added Time Machine, Spaces (virtual desktops), Boot Camp, etc.

Boot Camp was in Tiger for x86, but anyway... Removed support for input managers, removed write support for HFS, introduced garbage-collected Objective-C which has already been deprecated, removed support for Level 1 Postscript printers, removed support for AFP over AT.

Snow Leopard -- 10.6 -- 2009. my favorite release. SL was largely a refinement release with a new rewritten Finder and general speed increases. I still run 10.6 ln my laptop and many users (myself included) would argue it was the best OSX release.

Broke many Cocoa Java applications, OSX Server became far less stable. Removed NetInfo with no real unified configuration store to replace it and there are now XML configs all over the place. I still use it because it's the last release that supports old Final Cut Pro.

Lion -- 10.7 -- no idea what is supposed to be new or good in Lion. Resize windows from any border is the only thing I can think of. I use it at work on an old macpro and hate it compared to SL.

This is the release where OSX Server became completely useless. No more print quotas, adding Windows machines to a domain on OSX Server is useless, no QTSS, fucked up dumbed down admin UIs.

Oh I don't think anyone thinks it's evil, just that it's pure self-interest rather than generosity. GCC's phenomenal popularity has led to its maintainers growing massive egos and behaving like total cunts. Bugs are introduced faster than Red Hat and Apple can get patches for them accepted, and they have a nasty habit of not looking at bug reports, then closing them due to inactivity without actually fixing them. Apple probably likes the idea of being able to make closed-source forks of a compiler, too. Nothing evil, but not really generous either.

Well it's not surprising as the GCC maintainers are becoming completely impossible to work with. Each new version of GCC becomes less compatible with 3rd-party linkers and less popular runtime libraries (e.g. Solaris). It also becomes harder to build a working compiler for anything other than Linux. Often you need to hack stuff up to get it to build at all on SPARC, and even then it won't necessarily produce working executables. Red Hat GCC usually has fewer issues than FSF GCC, but by the time Red Hat fixes make it upstream, even more bugs will have been introduced. I think it comes down to lack of competition. GCC just became too popular for its own good, and that inflated the egos of the maintainers to the point where they don't give a shit about users. CLANG is still in the state where it's fighting for market share, so they have to care about users to get any traction, but if it becomes popular enough, it will probably go the same way as GCC.

Going slightly off-topic, Apple (principal CLANG contributor) is a lot like GCC. Back when they had almost no market share, they actually cared about users and did awesome shit. But now they have some traction they're a bunch of cunts. Tiger was a questionable update, and every OSX update since has been a load of shit. Mountain Lion makes the UI really annoying, and OSX Server is now completely useless. Final Cut Pro X is a steaming turd when the old Final Cut Pro was best in class software. Old iMovie wasn't great but it was usable. New iMovie has destructive editing, no proper timeline, and is completely useless for any half serious work. And they've made it so you can't run old iMovie or Final Cut on new versions of OSX, and you can't run old OSX on new machines. I'm waiting for them to do the same thing to Logic.

Even Microsoft kind of cared about users back when they were the underdog. They developed customised BASIC implementations for all the microcomputer manufacturers, DOS was for the most part better than CP/M '86, and Office for Mac kickstarted the platform. Everyone knows where market domination led them.

TLDR: market domination is the worst thing that can happen to anyone.

The 58,000 of you are nothing compared to the 400,000 civilians killed in a war that you had to use a false flag operation to start. What about them? What about the ongoing effects of what you left behind? My wife's cousin not only can't speak but has no concept of language because of the dioxins in the food chain. It really makes my blood boil when I see shit in the media that ignores the cost to Vietnam while making a big deal over the loss of American or Australian lives, or the effects of agent orange on foreign veterans. There's nothing to feel sorry for, that's the price you paid for a war you had no business starting.

If I can pull a Godwin, the winners of WW2 get to write history, build memorials to their lost, and demonise the other side. Accused perpetrators were tried and executed. There's no mourning for the Nazi soldiers who followed their government's orders to fight. There doesn't even seem to be much sympathy for the civilians who perished in the fire bombings. Why doesn't VN get the same luxury? They won the fucking war and got their own country back, but they're still painted as the bad guys. There's no sympathy for the civilians, the perpetrators of the war were never held to account, there's no compensation for the lingering effects. And I get a nice reminder of this every time I catch up with the extended family.

Seriously? The same Orly Taitz who's the queen of the "birther" movement?

Mongo fanboys. They're a menace to society. I worked at a trading firm that was infested with them, and they tried making Mongo a dependency in all parts of our codebase. It's nasty stuff, polluting your code with macros if you aren't extremely careful about #include order, running the server wreaks havoc with I/O on a box, and it really didn't perform that well when trying to extract the kinds of data sets needed for useful analysis.

That one links to this Salon article: http://www.salon.com/2000/05/26/free_love/
I've always wondered, is that article for real, or is it an elaborate troll itself?

Most spam I have to deal with comes from US, although Japan has increased its proportion of spam recently. I keep reading people complain about spam from China and eastern Europe, but I never receive much of it. I still think it's a case of racism causing blindness.

Hey kid, I'd left school behind before Hi-MD existed. Back in the '90s I worked in radio and we used MiniDisc for jingles, station IDs, ads, etc. Far more convenient than the old way of doing it on 30-second 8-track carts. You could have all the samples you needed for a day on two MiniDiscs. The ATRAC compression used on MiniDisc sounded pretty good if you started with a good source, but for some reason re-compressing something that had previously been compressed with MP3 sounded awful. Something about the combined artefacts of the two compression schemes was nasty, so you never wanted to record your MP3s off Napster onto MiniDisc. Now get off my lawn!

Philips clothes irons are the best I've used. My GC4420 works really well, and the weight of it makes it feel satisfying to use. No shit, a heavier iron feels better to use than a lighter one just because it's heavier. I also use a Philips electric shaver, but I'm considering switching to Panasonic on that front.

1.27 mm is exactly 50 mils, so that's not a great example.

It isn't exactly 50mil and that's the problem - itâ(TM)s slightly less than 50mil. If you treat it as being exactly the same you get problems with large or high pin count components not lining up. If we could get away from imperial components completely the problems would go away.