Sfi81

In most places, restrictions on bars and nightclubs are a moral/religious issues driven by the elected representatives (and hence the electing public's) perception of what is "right". Therefore logical arguments don't really work until majority of the populace is doesn't hold as strong emotional points of view. Amsterdam has of course for long been down that road and so these things are easier there.

Do what other civilized nations do.. Control drug prices and rein in military spending.

Probably commenting too late but I find it a lot simpler to just compile from source. After you're initially setup (you need a go1.4 installation in your homedir), you just pull the latest repo updates, checkout the release tag and run all.bash or all.bat each time. This also gives you cross-compilation and ability to contribute bug fixes.

Agree with much of the article. I personally find Apple iOS devices completely unusable because I have to constantly try to guess what kind of action or gesture will achieve what I want to do rather than being obvious. The same for several apps which appear to have become successful first on iOS before being ported to Android. I find remembering these gestures and actions an unnecessary cognitive load.

Sure... but Tarsnap is basically Colin, serving a very niche clientele and unlikely to be worth a few billions. Almost every tool discussed in the article is targeting mass market where such considerations become important at some point.

Follow the money.. All $150 billion of it (1)

The reason you see a lot of opinion pieces against ad blocking in mainstream press and blogs is because their main income stream comes digital advertising and either changing business model to paid content or negating ad blocking will take a lot of effort and expense.

There's literally hundreds of thousands of people in the journalism and ad industry who's ability to put bread on the table is put at risk and Apple's support for ad blocking threatens to tips the scale of blocking use. Naturally there is every incentive to expend journalistic and PR efforts to protect their income stream. Much like the music industry did in Napster days before iTunes.

It has very little to do with rights and morals and the like. I'd be surprised if most of the tech savvy writers writing these pieces don't use ad blocking themselves personally.

1. http://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising...

Ah ok!

Wouldn't it be simpler to just go all the way towards direct election than take a halfway step towards direct elections such as this?

Well you have to remember that the Swiss have both better income sources (assisting the world's wealthy & many corporations evade/optimize taxes for instance) and don't have military expenses and such due to neutrality.

While many problems of the US are of its own creation due to either ideology or wealth dominating politics (healthcare & education spring to mind), it is quite unfair to compare what the Swiss government provides with the US.

Thanks - haven't seen UML before & will take it out for a spin. In your experience does it have a big learning curve?

Thanks! it does looks interesting as I've tried using Prezi for this sort of stuff before but tripped on its "presentation focused" features whereas this seems more flexible

I run Ubuntu Trusty with kernal 3.19 on HP Chromebook 14 4GBRAM on which I upgraded the SSD to 64GB as my personal dev machine.I mostly work with Go, JS which work very well & Android Studio - the last is a bit slow but bearable - battery life is excellent. The most important enablers were buying a Haswell processor based model with support for Legacy boot and upgrading the ssd without which it's not really feasible to use it as a dev machine. http://chromebook-falco.blogspot.in/?m=1

Look up the ChrUbubuntu script for pointers on partitioning but it's not really needed as newer Linux kernals have most of the patches it applies. http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.in/2013/10/chrubuntu-for-new-c...

Well i live in India and while I can't comment on "starting a business" etc, I must say that over past few years i have found IT enabled services (both government and private) refreshingly easy to use and in some cases superior to what i have found in developed markets -especially Europe. Train tickets are very easy to book online and you actually need only the text message with the confirmation number and a proof of identity to travel. Online tax filing now comes with many fields pre populated and corporates can now only file online - no paperwork. Seeing any registered company's annual filings takes about 5 mins to process. The providend fund is now online and so is passport application. When I've travelled abroad especially in Europe, i sometimes find their systems charmingly antiquated.