Man, I'm watching Mr Robot these days, and Cambridge Analytica looks more and more to me like a real-life version of E Corp... http://mrrobot.wikia.com/wiki/...

Interesting. I've lived in the US for 2 years, around 2002. Back then, as a European, I found that drivers were *much* more disciplined than people in my home country (France). I came back in the US recently (same place I used to live in, with a rental car), and my impression has been that things have changed a lot on this front. I saw lots of incivilities (e.g. people using empty lanes to overtake other cars, resulting in traffic jams whenever lanes merge...), speeding, reckless driving... In the meantime, driving in Europe has improved significantly (it's still far from perfect). I don't know if there's any conclusion to be drawn from this, but the trend is pretty clear.

Yes, it was posted on the Strava website yesterday that an outage of AWS was responsible for their own outage.

Well, unless there is a critical piece of software you absolutely require, have you considered that maybe Windows may not be the right OS for graduate students to use, especially for week-long runs ? Mine exclusively use linux for their scientific work (as I do), and I've been happily doing this for years.

Reference, please ?

... and let me tell you that after last Friday, we are now experiencing a period in which the government can decide and impose whatever it damn pleases : massive surveillance, restricted freedom, you name it.... At this stage, I believe people are willing to accept anything in the name of (presumed) safety. At some point, this period will come to an end but until then, I except the law to change a lot, and essentially nobody is going to raise a finger about it....
Reminds me of the time when I was living in the US, right after 09/11. Sad, really.

Seems they won't let go of the awful ribbon. After all these years, I still hate it... So no thanks.

No. The plan is to get rid of old diesel cars indeed, but also to incentivize people to acquire gasoline rather than diesel cars. This will be done by applying some kind of malus on new diesel cars, and also by progressively aligning the price of diesel fuel with the price of gasoline (diesel fuel has been significantly cheaper than gasoline in France).

Man, when I read this kind of thing, I miss the days when I was using Pine in a terminal. No fluff, no crap, no nothing... Geez I'm getting old...

No, sorry but that's simply not true. The French language nowadays includes a lot of foreign words. Of course we have the French Academy which tries to impose French words for everything but really, these (generally old) guys are representative of themselves only, and have nearly no relevance. For instance, they tried to impose "couriel" instead of "email" (and a whole bunch of other ridiculous words) but hey, who would have guessed, it never picked up ...
I believe French-speaking Canadians, OTOH, tend to be much more protective towards the original language.

That is all.

Personally, I find Scilab pretty awful (and for the record, I'm french).

As a physicist, I use hearphones just to "enter the zone". Usually, after a while, I find them distracting. Kind of as if they were consuming brain cycles that aren't free anymore. I know it's time to remove them, hoping the phone doesn't ring or som jac^h^h^h coworker doesn't pop up...

If he knows, he's responsible. If he doesn't, he's incompetent. Which do you prefer ?

Pick up an instrument, or if you used to play an instrument when you were a teenager, time to get it out of the attics.
(Re-)learn how to play (we have great softwares and books/CD for this, nowadays) and learn by listening to the masters. Learn also some theory.
At some point, get out and find yourself a band, suited to your skills (a bit better, ideally) and taste. At the very least, you'll have fun but you could even end up being a good musician. Depends on the time you want to spend on it.