Vlaix

Free trade benefits all people.

At this point it's not economy, it's religion.

You can't expect the people who are the adjustment variable of worldwide unimpeded trade to applaud with both hands.

Now make a laptop with a keyboard and touchpad that justifies me stopping frankensteining my old machines to keep them alive.

That chiclet keyboard and phone-sized pad nonsense is very limiting.

Dell tax on options, I'd wager. If you look at the cost on everything that isn't the base, laptop manufacturers generally add an extra 100% on the retail price of these parts. 200% if you're Apple.

Support is good and reachable by phone

Really ? I used them quite a bit years and years ago, and at the time the support was somewhat garbage, which made me move to OVH.

Not surprised to read in the comments they're a subsidiary of Online.net. Ever since they've introduced ultra-cheap dedicated boxes ten years ago, it seems everybody's been sub-renting either them or OVH. I wonder why there aren't more similar offers worldwide, at least in Europe (I can only think of Leaseweb, and they're data capped). The network backbone isn't much different in Britain, Holland or Germany. And the server units aren't really custom.

To be completely honest, I also do it like this at the moment, using Kdiff as a merge tool. I've been thinking about moving over to Ediff, but I'm lazy.

Serious question, never used a git GUI in my life, is there a practical point to it ? I just can't see myself doing it without zsh, my nested .dotfiles, fasd and so on. And worst case scenario, I can always git them back.

You guys across the Atlantic need to understand than nobody in Europe ever cared about what the EU votes, unless they're a EU employee themselves.

Europe fell decades ago. The Marshall Plan we call it.

Odd you'd say that. Though I'm not a native English speaker, I found Spanish to be among the hardest languages I've come across (more so than Modern Greek or German), and I come from a French background with wide knowledge across all of the Romance board. I'd expect a English speaker to struggle even more than I did.

(The easiest language being English, due to exposure, extreme alienation by French a few centuries back and overall simplicity for the more casual ranges of speech.)

As a rule of thumb, English is choke-full of Anglo-Saxon/French redundancies that rarely come to light due to a register separation. Anglo-Saxon etymons tend to the lower registers of language, French (along with Latin, although the line between a word that came from French or straight from Latin can be very blurred, and Greek) ones to the higher.

The money would most likely go to the French state, hence benefiting indirectly to the whole of French citizens.

Wow, I went into the negative with that. You guys really need to learn how to take a joke (unless I'm being taken down by the hippie lobby, in which case I'll keep put. No surrendering to terrorists, even those who wield flowers).

I read "hippies" and rejoiced. If only...

The number of death is probably more an effect of the general destabilization of the country (which gave ample room, as an example, for various exactions on minorities in Irak besides the war, in particular on Christians) rather than direct casualties.

Getting things done ? You must have missed the Louvois scandale. You know, thousands of soldiers no being paid for almost a year and stuff...

The adoption of Linux is just consistent with the fact that we're getting poor.

Most of the French DON'T work for the government and unions have almost no power whatsoever. That's why they make a lot of noise.

Archiving languages is necessary for linguistics' sake. God knows we'd love to have at least some form of written attestation for most ancient tongues.

Trying to experience a bit of everything isn't a WASP thing, it's bona fide Humanism. As Montaigne put it : « I like better a well rounded head than a well filled one ». Western Universities are (or should be) the heirs of this tradition.

City creations are ordered all the time and they do not forcibly fail. Many new world (ie. US, Australia, NZ) cities weren't organically grown. And so were a lot of cities built during Antiquity that are still there in Europe. Greeks and Carthaginians (themselves Phenician colonials) founded colonies ex nihilo that are still thriving today. And so did the Romans, though they often built on top or besides existing urban centers (my own city was founded in -133 on a new spot, but was a few kilometers away from a Gaulish oppidum of which the population was subdued). Most of the cities inside what used to be the Empire have been rebuilt from the ground or created by Rome at some point. It's just a matter of good engineering.

I've been able to vote for quite a long time, and never did so out of principle (in a country where 80%+ of the population votes, very much unlike the US).

I actually think the need of surveillance for a number of nations (in particular Syria, which has been the target of widespread disinformation, slander and lies lately) is perfectly legitimate and I deem this opinion perfectly reasonable considered my general worldview. I put away childish things a long time ago.

Where being screwed over is concerned, I'm fairly familiar with it and as nothing always goes the way I pray it won't, I feel entitled to a bit of vaguely legitimate retribution. It's widely unpopular, especially on a site such as HN where the average Joe has the mind-openness of a witch's tit (whatever the whole hacker/geek ethos might suggest), but I gave away popularity when I started socializing with anything else than cats.

I personally support the use of IT as a means of oppression by various regimes. Not so much because of some peculiar esteem I'd have for said regimes, but because I'm kind of fed up by squinty libertarians and source-code rioters telling us what software and IT are and what they should be used for. Not even talking about the validity of armchair journalists' opinions about world politics. IT is a bunch of tools, and tools don't have a nature or an intrinsic value but functions. Now a tool that is used to control information _will_ be used to slow its spreading if needed, even though its creator had another idea in mind. Damn, using a network to forbid information when it was intended to spread it is even a form of hacking if you thing about it.

Now regarding the IT industry : the liberalism that allows startups to pop-up all the time at a tremendous rate also allows a company to sell products to clients that would be deemed shady in said company's nation. When you get by a system, you either accept its flows as well or play this hyper-hypocritical game of being outraged when things don't go your way.

Funny how the overreaction mostly comes from foreigners or people involved with Wikimedia activities.

It may have been handled abruptly (if it were properly handled, there wouldn't be any significant article about the event anywhere), but the DCRI is perfectly within its rights and was right to have the info taken down. No, information isn't free or benign. The right info in the right hands can be destructive, and I'm glad there are people watching out so that our national soil remains more or less safe. Knowing about very sensitive compounds _isn't_ a right nor a liberty.

Furthermore, it's not for the Wikimedia Fondation to assess the sensitivity of information, they merely provide efficient ways of spreading it and should stick to that.

HN gives me the impression that on a bi-daily basis there's someone, somewhere (generally an American brogrammer with too much hair and weird glasses living in the Valleyr or NY) who WANTS that I want to learn to code.

Is that someone actually the exact same person (looks like it) ? Does he know that code can be executed outside of a browser ?

When unzooming completely (using Opera), France and Great Britain are conjoined twins. And so on for Morocco and Spain, Denmark and Norway, Sicily and the rest of Italy...

Now think about what History would have been...

I don't really care about the medium itself (though it does seem out of place), but the object of the « performance » sends me back to everything I rabidly hate about our society. It makes me very grumpy.

One more reason not to attend Rails-related stuff.

They tend to recruit a lot of youngsters because coding-jobs are typically low on the CS ladder and don't forcibly attract people with more experience (that's a general statement, I perfectly know that specialized coding can get extremely lucrative).