Celcius

As a rule I only buy frozen vegetables as they don't get sprayed with preservations to stay pretty in the store.

That's just because you don't have any sense of humor.

I find complaining about HN (especially the "whaa to much noise") on HN highly ironic.

I wish more people would realized how cheap and easy it is for spammers to break captchas and how extremely hostile captchas are towards people with disabilites. Deaf-blind people aren't helped by the sound alternative, the few times that's even an alternative. The only protection captchas give is one of inconveniance for spammers, it's not a working obstacle and the whole idea is flawed.

Spammers can be fought by traffic analysis, communication caps and community based moderation. Even if you are absolutely insisting on captchas please don't do it as a first line of defense, use them on spikes like how youtube handles mass comment voting.

The reference for the article gives 404 and physorg doesn't seem to have an article covering the subject. Heres the original paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/leskov...

In my school (a Swedish University) we sometimes have to turnin our papers via Urkund which is similar to TurnIn, although we don't sign anything in doing so. I read that I can opt-out of having my paper used outside of my local university though, I'm not sure why that would matter to me but at least that's something.

The main thing that worries me with outsourcing these types of things is that how could you defend yourself if the system finds you guilty of plagiarism when the source isn't open. It's not like false-positives can't happened and it seems perfectly reasonable that it should happened with an increasing rate as the system grows.

I've learned to use wikis, version control systems (which granted I should have been using prior to that anyways..) and other ways of keeping a history of how my work progresses so that if I at some point would have to defend myself I can actually show the entire process behind something and not just the finished product.

My biggest fear when it come to being accused of cheating is getting called out on the spot and then not being able to answer because my brain shuts down, like how many people curse themselves for not being able to answer job-interview engineering questions even though they knew the answer. Instant expulsion unless I guess you proclaim you are guilty and beg for your life, then maybe come of with a warning.

I've got no idea but re-coining (or I guess pre-coining) the term web 2.0 into something that doesn't make me cry a bit on the inside every time I or others mention it is pretty high on my list.

In Sweden I'd say we almost always use Visa and to a lesser extent master card. If a website doesn't want to deal with credit cards, I think a local version of paypal https://www.payson.se is more common than paypal if it's a page that's only avaliable in Swedish. I'm only really basing this on my own experience and observations though.

The HN title and in parts the wording of the article is misleading, even if it's later cleared up in the article. For them to refuse to retain data would imply it's somehow required of them, which it isn't.

Not only that but they are only four people of a much larger swarm maintaining the pirate bay. Even if they go to jail it wouldn't mean anything to the site being up or not.

Somehow I doubt it matters one bit how you use reverse psychology (or don't), they'll have sex anyways. It might work fine for things like "Walk against red at a crossing", but with sex your fighting hormones.

The legal age for consent is 15 in my country, so the idea is somewhat absurd to me. There was plenty of virgins in my high school, plenty who wasn't (and some lost theirs quite a bit earlier). Doesn't seem to matter one bit.

Although maybe that mind trick worked on me when mother told me to go out and have fun partying with the other kids when I hit puberty, I go out drinking substantially less than my peer at the university do.

This needs to be sent to our alchol stores that are a monopoly controled by the government (I think that's absurd too) who are only allowed to run adds against drinking, it would be hilarious if they started running adds telling you to drink.. so you wouldn't.

I live in Sweden, btw.

Yeah it raised an eyebrow for me, it's an interesting cultural phenomenon. As a Sweed I've never had to think about healthcare, it's just there and I take it for granted. Maybe I should start appreciating it more. :)

There was a guest lecturer at my university who gave a talk on distributed development who claimed there's been studies that have shown developers don't tend to get happier the more they are payed as long as they aren't payed too little. Instead they seem to value things like training or just staying challenged as opposed to money.

I'm sorry I don't know exactly what studies he was referring too, but I'm highly inclined to believe what he was saying and it would agree with what you are saying.

I wasn't at all implying it's the only option but rather that it's an option. I don't think you can entirely avoid discussions in that format especially if you are discussing non-professional topics like politics, how you should raise children or other highly opinionated things.

You always get to choose the people you are having a discussion with and some people have a hard time taking someone disagreeing with them. Even if the discussion might feel unpleasant in the heat of the moment I find that days or weeks after the fact, I can still have the conversation in my head and feel I've gained some insight into other peoples minds and maybe even agree with them.

So all I was implying was that they aren't entirely pointless, however frustrating they may be. I can see your point of wanting to avoid the frustration, even if I personally have quite a thick skin and don't mind it all that much.

I could mention that I'm from Sweden, but I doubt that helps at all. :) I do like to stress that I don't try start those types of discussions and I do think people who start shouting are silly, but I do argue against someone however loud their voices are. :)

EDIT: I could probably also say that I tend to stay in heated group arguments mainly because of the audience rather than whoever might be disagreeing with me. As people who tend too shout don't tend to change their mind but letting them have the only word might make the audience think that they are right.

I'm sorry but I don't understand the rationale behind that statement and I wouldn't voice my oppinion if it wasn't you've been upmodded so much. So I'm curious, if you do not partake how can you possibly succeed?

While I do understand why you'd be reluctant to partake in them, it's not like they hold no value whatsoever or there being an inherent loss in partaking.

Although I do prefer civilized discussions.

This might be a bit cynical of me but I'm quite convinced that if a rich foreigner wanted to become an American citizen that wouldn't be much of a problem.

Steve Jobs for example got Feist, American citizenship: http://www.tuaw.com/tag/leslie-feist/ it's not the same thing but there obviously has to be different channels to go through for the wealthy.

I've found that Wikipedias references are usually really good and then just using wikipedia and wikibooks to become familiar with the subject enough too investigate further is quite effective.

Although if I want to really study something beyond introductory reading I use scholar.google.com and looking at the articles published in the last decade or so as well as looking at the papers citing them too be quite effective. Although that is most effective when you are researching a narrow subject and it does sometimes require you too pay too have access too the journals, something which my university provides.

Lastly there are quite a lot of recorded univerity lectures published online that cover just about any subject you'd want to study from the comfort of your computer. I'm verry happy google has made an effort to gather them at: http://www.youtube.com/edu recently altough there's other places. For computer-science in particular I've found this blog to be highly good at gathering the interesting ones: http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/

I realize you might already know all of this but as a student I personally am quite pleased with what the Internet provides for me especially as I like (and it enables me) to go far above and beyond what is assigned as course work, when I study something.

The issue is far more complicated than just file sharing, the issue of file sharing has simply brought the anonymizing services to light to the general public. Sweden recently passed a law that lets our government perform targeted mass surveillance and is in the process of passing data retention laws. Essentially our government are bullying its people into civil disobedience.

Now all the studies and polls I've seen in Sweden since the file sharing debate went mainstream a few years back is that people think file sharing for personal use is ok and my own anecdotal experience suggest it's no longer something you brush under the table it's something you do openly.

This is going on at the same time as the Cinemas in Sweden reported no loss in ticket sales between 1997-2007 (also consider this is the time when home cinema packages went mainstream) and SF the biggest cinema company reported record ticket sales for 2009. This is in a country where virtually everyone have access to at the least 24mbit DSL.

Personally I like going to the movies as does my friends, we see 3-10 movies a year even though we take no moral issue with piracy and don't mind watching movies on tiny 12" laptop screens when we feel like it. You go too the movies for the experience it sort of like why would you go out and drink in a crowded bar where you have to que for overpriced alcohol and possibly be hassled by random drunks when you can have a party at home with whoever you like.

I'm not familiar with how rails has been developed but I'm guessing the explosion is due to there previously only being a small group of people with commit access, as opposed to a sudden rush of people working on it when it hit github, right?

It's not illegal to pay for an anonymizing service in most parts of the world including Sweden.

If you want a printed one (which was my first thought) reserve it by sending them an email with "Reserve WTM" as the topic as per the instructions: http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-4-final-beta/ they will only make a thousand.

We don't have to innovate anything, we already have VPNs. As long as the content exists on the Internet, one can asume that you will be able to access it from somewhere so the only action you need to take is route your traffic to that place before accessing the content.

With Tor it is so easy to go around these things that you install a program and push a button to have your trafic bypass any and all national filters, if only more people dared to put up servers so Tor wasn't so extremely slow.

That list is somewhat incomplete and out of date (at least in the case of searchmash and lively). Wikipedia seems to have a more complete list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Besides €3 probobly being enough set up a tunnel too Germany, USA or UK and then get the free service (aswell as having a way around that problem on other occations). I can't help but feel sorry for the poor nations where €3 is an unreasonable amount of money. I get that it was a buisness decission but them exempting certain countries just alienates those of us who aren't on that list, or at least that's how I feel.

Europe, Sweden

My first thought as other people have already noted was that I would be terribly guilt tripped and pay slightly above what I thought would be the average to make myself look good.

I do wonder however if people also pay more as a form of social-compensation and not guilt as they figure they are weighting up the cheap people.

This phenomenon would make an interesting study to read.

When I noticed I could opt in interests for the advertising I did that instead. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but if they are going to give me advertisement at least now maybe I'll find some of them relevant. I appreciate the gesture that they let people who care more about their own privacy than me to opt-out, though.

I refuse to help people with their computers unless I can remote control them. Even then it's only for close enough friends and family.

Programmer != Technitian :(