I'm typing this comment on my shiny new-ish Blackberry KeyOne, an Android phone with a QWERTY keyboard. It took about a week to adapt back to using physical keys, but after a few months of use I'm totally content. So much less frustration when you can actually feel the keys!

I still disprefer that style. It works ok for quick one-liner replies, I guess, but what I really want is a conversation, and that means I want the context quoted near the reply, inline.

Alas, Microsoft never understood that there is more than one way to do it, and shoehorned their corporate style down our throats by making it difficult to convince Exchange to work any other way, so we're stuck with the dominance of top-posting now.

Right there with you: I started slinging code in the '80s, I've been making my living that way for over twenty years, and Ubuntu is my default because it works and I don't have to waste time futzing with it. Of course it's not perfect, but it's certainly no worse than the alternatives, and in many ways it is better. I love the fact that I don't have to think about it - give me a machine, new or old, doesn't matter, throw on whatever the most recent Ubuntu LTS happens to be, bam we're in business.

The government money only needs to flow long enough to subsidize enough investment to bootstrap the industry. Prices are coming down and scale is going up, exactly as you would expect. The government is probably stuck providing some degree of subsidy for a long time to come simply because such political programs are difficult to kill, but it won't take many more years before solar is cheap enough to be the obvious choice with or without subsidy.

I missed that golden threshold, alas, but can I still have demigod status?

That makes it sound like driverless cars will be a disaster. We will have a nightmare ahead of us already when it comes time to clean up after the last century of suburban sprawl - why on earth would we want to double down on disaster by encouraging even more of it?

Yeah, at this point I pretty much just immediately flip the bozo bit on anyone who uses the term "SJW" non-ironically. It conveys no useful information except that the person using it is... um... possibly a troglodyte.

It's not a lot of power by American standards but it seems totally reasonable for Morocco. When I visited a decade ago, electricity was used primarily for lighting, and virtually all bulbs were compact-fluorescent. Space heaters generally used propane or kerosene, not electricity. Power-hungry appliances like clothes dryers and dishwashers were not at all common, and their cuisine depends far less on refrigeration than ours does.

This is one of the reasons I'm happy to keep on paying whatever it costs to repair my increasingly-clanky old SUV. At least it's not spying on me; it's actually mine.

Your risk assessment is completely backwards. The US government makes it pretty difficult to find out exactly how many people the cops shoot each year, but it's a lot: in 2011, it was 1,146. American cops shot more people in *one year* than all mass shootings combined *in that decade*.

http://jimfishertruecrime.blog...

In terms of saving lives, forbidding cops from carrying guns would be the most effective form of gun control we could institute.

You can always ignore the busybodies and do what you like, you know.

There's no new evidence here - it was obvious the instant we saw the photo of his project that he'd repackaged the guts of some old AC clock! Good for you that you figured out exactly which one it was, but really, so what? I worked on similar projects when I was his age. You have to start somewhere, and casemodding a piece of old garage-sale junk is a totally reasonable project for a 14-year-old newbie.

We aren't making a fuss over him because he's an extraordinary genius; rather, we're making a fuss over him because he's just an ordinary kid who *ought* to have been treated with ordinary respect, and we're trying to make up for the unforgivably shitty dumbass bullshit he's been subjected to.

And really, it's less about him than it is about all the other kids like him: the message is "don't let those fucknuts in Texas scare you, smart young Muslim inventor kids; America at large thinks you're cool".

I browse the web in Firefox. I visit Facebook in Chrome. I never, ever, for any reason log in to Facebook from Firefox.

That sounds like the most useful way of doing things. If I haven't built and tested my codebase against a specific library version, how can I assert that my codebase works properly with that specific library version?

The counterargument holds that this should never happen as long as people use semantic versioning properly, but that's no more realistic than expecting people to release bug-free libraries that never need to be upgraded.

I would be happy to do without the free stuff, most of which is crap, if it meant I would never have to deal with advertising anymore.

Ad-supported "free" stuff feels like a bait-and-switch; "here's something cool, oh no wait it's just an ad-delivery medium". I'd rather know up front what I'm getting into, and not have ad-encrusted crap constantly trying to sneak past my filters by acting like real stuff.

Adblockers help a lot, and making a general rule of avoiding commercial media helps too, but it'd be really nice if I could relax and let my guard down sometimes. It's not fun knowing that there is an army of trained professionals out there doing their crappy best to manipulate me into buying certain things or thinking about things in certain ways, and that nothing short of constant vigilance will protect me from them.