Flip-per

That's interesting.

In the list of intentional homicides Sri Lanka indeed ranks higher than I expected, rank 132 of 230: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

About being calm: I agree about the anger on roads. Except for that my impression was a calm and peaceful one -- maybe what you encounter as violent is still OK from my culturally distinct perspective? Do you think there are many 'fights'/arguments where people are shouting in the public, or would such a thing happen at home?

And what is your opinion about the high suicide rate?

I've been to Sri Lanka recently where 70 % of the people are Buddhists. It's a beautiful island, the people are very calm and nice to each other and to Tourists, it was a pleasure to travel around. It's a very safe place, crime and stealing is almost nonexistent. Disagreements are solved in a quite calm way.

And then I got aware that it has one of the highest suicide rates worldwide. How comes? One issue might be that Sri Lankans do not talk about their feelings. The civil war ended 10 years ago, not talking about what happened very likely has bad effects on mental health. Another issue could be that hiding aggression might not be healthy either. Studies show that hiding aggression is one possible cause for depressions, which might depend on the society you are living in. (I didn't read those studies but heard them from multiple reliable sources) Being aggressive doesn't mean starting to hit somebody, it can be raising your voice and get your opinion across very clearly. I'm not sure whether a calm and self-controlled Inuit child would have an easy time in a western Kindergarten, school, or workplace.

Fairy tales in central Europe are equally violent. My mom refused to read or tell me those fairy tales because of that.

Pretty much zero. Except if they want to shut down github and need a bandwagon full of bad press and furious developers.

Stretching went from dynamic stretching (bouncing) to static, and then back to dynamic - with phases of not stretching at all. There were even books about how stretching was considered dangerous or harmful.

I agree that the sports industry is trying to sell tons of unnecessary stuff. But only because there is not (yet) any scientific evidence doesn't mean that something doesn't work.

Sports academia has a long history of false findings and changing its mind. Just look at how the opinion about stretching changed, which in my humble opinion should be rather easy to assess.

Given this uncertainty I'd look both at academia and at what top athletes do. Keeping in mind that the top athletes have very different circumstances and needs compared to amateurs.

Most of the plastic gets into the oceans from a couple of rivers in Asia. I wonder whether it'd be possible to build such cleanup facilities close to those river mouths (still in the rivers, not in the ocean). It'd be easier to maintain and clean the filter systems - to me that seems easier and more effective. It could be an addition to filter systems in the ocean.

TLDR: Misleading title, waste of time. "Finland is analyzing the results to see what lessons can be learned." - that's all the substance there is.

It's just a video of two randomly picked persons of this experiment, which doesn't tell anything.

Absolutely. My more than 7 year old X220 now has 12GB RAM and would support up to 16GB afaik. Moreover it has a non-glossy screen, and a replaceable battery.

I don't think that you just have to be passionate and the money will follow. Making money depends on many other personality characteristics than just passion.

> You can't eat food grown in huge areas of Europe.

Do you mean Tschernobyl? It depends how you define 'huge areas in Europe', there is a good overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an...

According to this table, 10 % of Austria is contamined with 37–185 kBq/m2 (lowest contamination of this table). You can eat food grown anywhere in Austria, I do not know where 'food not edible' starts.

But just the fact that you now have to discuss such things is wrong enough.

Why is this so important to you? I, living in Europe and not owning a car, would be happy about higher gas prices (they are way higher in Europe than in the US already). Because I hope this would help to reduce CO2 emissions.

I'm contributing to a >20k LOC open-source python/django project (counting .py files only). It's quite clean with an architecture that makes sense, and thus way easier to understand and refactor than an actually smaller Java project at work. Admittedly, I have more of a Python background than a Java background.

Both links work for me; They go to debian wiki pages (which could be confusing), is that what you mean?

Big waves travel over long distances in the open sea. But it's not the big waves that would disturb when you are floating around, they would just make you float up and down a bit. More disturbing are the small waves that are caused by nearby winds. At the ocean you very often have some wind nearby (depends on the region, season etc).

Also living in Austria (Vienna), I do not experience the situation being as bad as you do. There are cafés where you can talk for hours (also in the evening), there are pubs (some of them do play loud music tough), and plenty other bars where you an go to and have a nice chat, with background music but not disturbingly loud. I'm sensitive to noise but there are usually plenty of choices if I want to hang out in tranquil places. The situation is different on the countryside where you don't have that much choice.

Could you please look up and post the name of these?

> I definitely feel like a slave.

In no other area it's that easy to break free. You on your own or with a couple of friends/colleagues. As a side-project if you have that much energy, or full-time if you saved some money.

Don't want to take the risk and effort? Work on projects of other people/companies. Even less risk? Take a part-time job, that will still get you a decent income and heaps of spare time.

> As a result, others take advantage of us

Do you have a family, debt and ill parents nearby that make it impossible to look for something else, or why do you allow that somebody takes advantage of you?

I think that you (we) are in one of the most comfortable, luxurious and free positions that ever existed.

How else would you introduce backwards incompatible changes? Especially with the LTS upgrade path that alasdairnicol mentioned I wonder what there is still to improve.

Copyright could be used as litmus test to see who actually makes decisions / writes laws in a country.

So if Allo, Whatsapp and Signal itself use the protocol and implementation of Signal, wouldn't it be possible to freely choose one of these clients which then can communicate with all other clients?

I do not like this approach, and I think it is not the right way for medium to large software projects. Maintaining lots of interacting 'just-good-enough' code is a nightmare - and it can easily cost you way more than you saved writing it.

People get lazy and sloppy early enough. I would try to encourage teenagers to go for the best and most beautiful solution that they can possibly find.

I spent a whole afternoon+evening reading before recommending my brother a laptop that is a) available where he happened to be and b) would probably just work fine with Linux.

The article discusses several points that would substantially improve Linux. And it addresses your concerns several times, like here:

"There's a great chance that you, as a user, won't ever encounter any of them (if you have the right hardware, never mess with your system and use quite a limited set of software from your distro exclusively)."

Ignoring criticism and possibilities of how to improve Linux ("cause it works for me already") doesn't do any good. IMHO the article is a great write-up that could help to improve these issues in the long run.

So far there's a couple of prototypes and no boxes were sold. A small initial batch (100 boxes) is planned for 2016.

The FreedomBox Foundation is led by Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center (http://softwarefreedom.org/), which takes care of the human and law layer.

These are the initial goals, but you can think of anything that decentralizes the web and advocates privacy.

Here are the packages that are currently included: https://github.com/freedombox/Plinth/tree/master/plinth/modu...

That's tor, owncloud, openVPN, mumble, pagekite, xmpp, ikiwiki, shaarli, transmission, roundcube.

There are also plenty of ideas for new applications/services/protocols, like replacing DNS, that would be a good fit.

Mono-cultural areas are areas where nobody wants to move to. These are almost exclusively third-world countries.

The borders of nations are a bad separation or aggregation for cultures, we'd have to look at cultures by themselves and compare results there. But for now the immigrant percentage of the population has to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant...

China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Madagascar, Cuba, Lesotho, Philippines, Burma, Morocco, North Korea, Somalia, Eritrea, Colombia, Afghanistan, ... That's where you can find regions with pristine mono-cultures.

Comparing these to truly multi-cultural countries like Switzerland, Hong-Kong and Australia I strongly doubt your hypothesis.

In the UK you lose your unemployment insurance benefits and thus the health insurance after ~30 weeks (source: http://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=10852&langId=en)

Average for EU countries is ~50 weeks. That's not long if you do not want to work for money for the rest of your life.

Switching is no problem usually, but if you are able to work but not 'willing' you'll lose your health insurance pretty soon.

First sentences of the article:

"Where the streets have no name," sang rock frontman Bono on one of U2's biggest hits. "It must be hell being a postman, then," came the sarcastic rejoinder from the music press.

But the system they come up with is still hell for a postman. He either remembers the 111111 three-word combinations for his square kilometer of delivery, or he can't work without an electronic device.

I see the problem, but hope that there are better solutions. Especially ones that are free: A non-free address system is absurd in my opinion, to put it mildly.