Okay, I swear this is true. I have an irrational fear of sliced bread. Only when it's sliced, and only when it's bread. If it's a loaf, I'm fine. If it's toast, I'm fine. But if it's a slice of bread, I feel physically ill and have to extract myself from the region. I don't know if you can classify it as a fear per se, but if you associate fear with "generates extreme discomfort" I think it would be.

There's widespread insurance fraud in Russia, but there's also quite a bit of corruption within police ranks, so drivers will usually install a dashboard camera to defend themselves.

http://www.rferl.org/content/dash-cams-russia-fighting-corru...

It was helpful that it occurred in the land of dashboard cameras. If it was anywhere else but Russia we'd have much less footage.

Some IRC clients will close to background, and alert you when your name is mentioned. mIRC is a common client, but I prefer Pidgin.

I'm a huge lurker on many, many sites, but I probably lurk the hardest on HN, Reddit and Hubski. Fear of being wrong, and a lack of respect for one's own opinion I'll admit are big factors, but I think there's also an issue of being late to the party. I see threads on Reddit's 'Hot' feed, that have been weeded out by the Reddit hive-mind as being full of good discussion and content. But as soon as I get to the comments I suddenly get extremely disappointed because there's been a discussion raging for the past day or so. I, personally, feel that often a lot of what needs to be said, has been said. On the flip-side, when I do have something to say, often I feel that there will be very little audience to see it and to respond to it. It's a bit like, 'what's the point' (I don't feel this applies to Hubski, which puts new comments up the top)

Hubski really solves a lot of this problem by allowing people with a large numbers of followers to share threads and links posted by an occasional lurker that comes out of the woodwork. However, I think it's intimidating for some new users to see people with a huge amount of followers and make huge contributions to the Hubski community. Maybe a way to search and subscribe to new users that have certain interests? To join a new website and be quickly greeted by a "### has started following you" would really really encourage new people to feel like they have an audience that they feel like they can connect with.

Just my two cents.

I think I might have to agree with you slightly. However, on the other hand you have a large group of informed youth that very rarely vote. In Australia only 40% of (relatively informed) youth voted, despite it being compulsory. In some cases, you actually need to give a people a kick in the backside, people that are actually informed but might be sitting in the political centre, or just unhappy with all major parties, to get them to vote.

This is how you get even more ignorant votes. People will just do it because they have to, and a lot of people will probably pick one at random (not caring about politics).

Arguably, this prevents political extremism, causing all of the major parties to the centre. Pushing more voters to vote prevents political influence by lobby groups.

Wipeout HD on the PS3.

I can't explain how much I love this game and its predecessors on the PSP (I haven't had a chance to get Wipeout 2048 for the Vita). It's such a thrilling game, and playing it after at least 200 hours is still fun. It deviates significantly from most games - you don't drive cars, you fly anti-grav racers. You travel at 700km/h, you have aerobrake control, you can literally fly across sections of the track if you're travelling fast enough.

It annoys me that there is no "Show answer" option on Code Academy. They've tried to go the handholding route by giving you subtle hints when you mess up, and creating a dedicated forum to answer questions. But often the subtle hints fail, and an "official" annotated answer would be really damn helpful.

I decided to start to learn to code, about 4 days ago. I've been going through the Python course on Code Academy, trying my hand at some problems from Project Euler. Code Academy is pretty damn good, but it has some issues with telling you what exactly you're doing wrong. It will tell you that you've done something wrong, but you're never told what is wrong, and why it's wrong. I also found that just going through the source code from game jams and just screwing around with it until it does something interesting. So far it's been pretty rewarding, but occasionally I'll run into problems and trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong is particularly brutal.

Oh wow, I'm really honored. I browse Hubski daily and that link was me deciding to stop lurking and actually contribute to this community.

It doesn't help that the F-35 is going to be the only fighter that Australia is going to be operating in any major capacity for the next couple of decades - considering how we held on to the F-111s for dear life until Parliament threw up their hands because they were getting too expensive to maintain. It seems that the F-35s are replacements for the F-111s which were designed specifically as long range bombers and served their role perfectly. The F/A-18 (I think this is Australia's primary air superiority figher at the moment) are ageing and keeping them airworthy is proving inefficient and costly. F-22s can't be purchased due to an export ban. It seems like it was a very expensive gamble from the beginning and by the looks of it, it might not pay off.