1) Mail.ru is trying to resuscitate ICQ with a new release. The site, icq.com, has an English version written in an obvious translatese from Russian.
2) Someone has written a long post on why they are leaving Elm. I am planning to read it, but in the mean time I clicked on the About link, and read this developer’s brief intro:
I am British, in fact English. For some reason, I have a sense of pride in this fact. Why I should be proud of a belonging to nation like this, whose past “greatness” went hand in hand with colonnial exploitation, whose current state is an ever downward moral spiral, whose immense heritage of God’s goodness and undeserved blessing continues to be rejected and reversed by almost every new law that is passed, and whose future almost certainly lies in the societal collapse and economic disaster that inevitably follows this kind of behaviour, I don’t quite know.
I sense that I could never empathize with this continual condemnation of colonialism, as well as with this preoccupation with morality. It never stops surprising me to find these sentiments in intellectually very high-functioning people.