simondelacourt's comments

India has quite a history of communal riots[0], and Gujarat is a state where violence tends to become really wacky. As a kid I've lived a few years in Rajkot, Gujarat, during and after the Ayodhya riots and violence spread easily based on rumour. But it also has a long history of censorship.

I can understand why the Indian government shuts down a service like mobile internet, they have had a great number of casualties due to these communal riots. But it seems far from the right thing to do.

But the root of the problem is so much a social problem, and the current government (as well as the past governments) have done way too little to introduce more social equality. The backward class programs have not fixed the problem of the caste society, and the country still benefits largely of the enormous cast differences. Modi and his BJP have used the caste system, both for their businesses (Gujarat mainly is a booming business state) and political benefit (it is way easier to get your election going through the system of castes).

Modi and his group had a strange role during the Muslim-Hindu riots of Ghodra, and his stance towards Muslims is highly doubtful [1].

I wonder what more will come up on this story in the following days.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_violence_in_India#Gu... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/opinion/being-muslim-under...

In this case; http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_i... you might call it funny. But I'd probably call it sad.

I don't think that exposing peoples private lives, even though they did something wrong, on this scale is remotely funny. I think it is quite sad. It does not only effect the members of the site, but also their families, the company they work at, etc.. This breach has so much collateral damage.

I can not really understand how it is funny.

I have done the same tour, but did not get medical insurance from the government, no I got a waiver that after entering the 30 km exclusion zone if something goes wrong only I am to blame.

The tour is quite worth it, but it still is very much disaster tourism, and the educational value is very much 'oh ah wow', and has little to do with really understanding anything of the situation. The only thing it really taught me, and I find that a valuable lesson is that actually trying to comprehend what has happened and why is not easily done. For example, the official death toll is something like 30 for the Chernobyl disaster itself, but it is impossible to actually calculate all the deaths that are a result of the disaster on the long term.

The same thing goes for what is happening with the metal that has been scrapped from the sight (shitloads of cars/vehicles have been removed in the past years that have been used to 'clean' the sight). The tour guide said that the cars are sent to china to become recycled metal.

Not sure if its true, but it made me understand that for a lot of things when it comes to Chernobyl there is not one definite answer.

The wrist band lock seems rather impractical the majority of circumstances that you'd encounter in the aftermath of a disaster or in refugee camps. And the advantage of no assembly seems to be a rather small advantage compared to the cost (a rather bulky construction). The amount of shelters you can put on a truck (http://static1.squarespace.com/static/52e6ca70e4b0aeaf06546d...) seems to be quite little.

I like the techy look and the idea seems cool, but it also seems to look like a very technocratic approach to shelters. This might work well for first world countries that have to deal with the fixing shelters after a disaster when conditions are quite good. But I can't see this helping out afters disasters like the one in Nepal.

Because their primary objective is not yours. You have an interest that somewhere in the middle meets theirs, but only just meets that interest. You do not share that interest until you become a shareholder.

Money is not just money, it equals to power as well, so those with the majority will rule.

Money is in that sense not directly harmful, but misunderstanding that companies have their own agendas is rather harmful.

I don't know, but I can't say the Netherlands is that much more progressive when it comes to privacy.

The data retention law has been put on hold, but the ruling VVD is looking for ways to get it back.

Bits for Freedom is an organisation worth checking out; https://www.bof.nl/category/english/

Somehow this makes me think of this xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/927/

For me the UI and its interactions is part of the service. UIs are really dominant when it comes to experience of a service.

The UI feels like a 1 to 1 copy of the Slack client, or is Slacks UI so common now copying it is just using the Chat-UI standard?

I don't really understand how it proves the point. I find the article not really proving many points.

When bike lanes are not separated they are only not separated because of a cost or space issue in Amsterdam. Not by design. I spend most of my days in Amsterdam, others in The Hague, and when I cycle I prefer to cycle on a bike lane. Drivers still tend to push you aside when there are no specific lanes.

The article, and many foreigners find the dutch system amazingly impressive, but for me, dutch, I still see a lot of room for improvement. Cars inside the city still annoy, cycling lanes are still ignored by parking cars.

It does have a camera, but it is located just below the screen. Your hands will be in front of it when you type use the camera.

I don't think this is a stage of development. It is a business concept. To keep some rich we need a poor majority. It is not that complicated. We like 6 new fashion collections a year, we like the primark for selling it for virtually no money, we like big brands advertising. We just dig cheap crappy fashion, and more over we dig not paying the full price.

I always find it interesting if people attribute poverty to a stage of development. That just does not work. It is not something you go through, and in the end we all come out richer. It is far more part of the system, it is not a country being going through infancy or puberty waiting to mature. We benefit so much from their poverty.

Well, the attention it generates and the amount of people fooled make it something that shouldn't be there. When people who do not know the e-cat is a fraud read this and get interested they could have spent their energy on something more useful.

Plus, nobody might have complained, but damage can be done without complaining.