SeppoErviala

I didn't use Steam since switching to Linux in 2008 until now that it is officially available. Some of that 1.85% are new (or returning) customers.

This is the new beginning after the burning platform company has finally been sold to Microsoft. Alternatively the new beginning for maemo/moblin/meego/whatever.

Our families and countries work differently.

This scenario doesn't work if the only place to return cans is a recycling center that has no other function and is located at a far away place or if the monetary amount received from cans is trivial. It doesn't work too well either if a child can just pester for money instead of having a fixed allowance + bonuses for work.

In Finland the return amount is currently 0.1-0.4€ per can/bottle and one can return them to the nearest grocery store. For me that was some serious pocket money - even a few bottles could buy some candy.

And it wasn't about pestering my parents to go to the store, more like tagging along when they went. I still had to carry the cans (or at least carry as much as I could if there were a lot) and return them to the machine myself - very different from just getting money handed over.

Anyway, my personal experience from my country of residence is that returning bottles is a good way to make pocket money especially if you can monopolize bottles from your own household and you have poor income.

If you show initiative and return the cans you can obtain money that would not be available otherwise. Pretty straightforward in my mind.

I think one of the reasons for returnable cans and bottles is to teach children about money and work. Many people I know once ran the can business in their household as children.

EDIT: This requires grocery stores to take return bottles, I'm not sure if I would let my children to a hobo-filled recycling center.

In Finland, one gets 0.15€ per can returned and slightly less/more for different kinds of bottles. It is very easy to return these since every grocery store has a return machine and one can just take the money without buying anything.

The consequence of this is that some people patrol the streets and collect every returnable can they can find just like in this article. However, during summers it seems to be very lucrative business as many people go to city parks to enjoy the sun and some beer. Very few people bother to collect their own cans since one can just toss the can and be sure that someone will collect it within minutes.

I've noticed that the can collecting business is somewhat organized during the prime season. Major parks seem to have groups of people (sometimes quite young, children even) who try to monopolize the can collecting in each park. Periodically there is a car that takes all their cans presumably to a bulk return center. None of these people are ethnic finns.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It seems horrible that some people venture off from one country to pick up the thrash of others in another country. OTOH the trash problem is reduced and we cannot interfere with the free movement of people within EU.

There are multiple music store providers and a musician should have presence in all of them.

It seems that DistroKid solves this problem by uploading the music to all the music stores (not really all atm but maybe they will get there). This way musicians doesn't need to study what kinds of hoops they need to hop through to get included in any of the stores.

"About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." - Bill Gates @ 1998

Only reason GIF is still alive is its animation support. APNG and WEBP+animation are not there yet.

8-bit palette and crappy compression do not matter when you offer exclusive features.

Thanks! This should really be listed in the HN/rss page.

I want a google reader replacement but this requires me to install something instead of just working.

I would like more powerful filtering options and better recommendations. For example, Hacker News feed is impossible to follow as RSS on reader as it has too high volume (for me at least). I would be content with ~40 daily recommendations.

Google reader had decent random recommendations before the G+ update. I believe that a good recommendation system can guess relevant items for given user, but that was not what google reader has been doing for some time now.

No localization, I'm not too interested in USA news.

The petition will not help.

Google already killed reader in their hearths when they made the g+ update. Instead of neglecting it for years to come they did the right thing and let it go for good.