Um, Assad?

Ethics is an interesting discussion. The road is a finite resource for which demand exceeds supply. As a result, there is already rationing taking place - in the form of waits times to use the road: congestion. This is, on the surface, very "fair" and "egalitarian", but also very wasteful of time, gasoline, pollution, and wear-and-tear on equipment.

On the other hand, a system that lets poor people get where they want to go, albeit by bus, faster and more cheaply than before also could be deemed "fair". You'd have only affluent people driving, so that would create a societal divide.

I guess my answer is: I don't know.

Thank you, finally a future subject who "gets it". You'll go far in my administration.

Are you sure about that? I would think that clogging the roads is an inefficient use of infrastructure.

If I were dictator, I'd toll the roads as high as need be until traffic levels come down to designed capacity. If there is some excess cash after paying for maintenance, this would subsidize a bus route along the same now-free-flowing highway(s). The bus would actually be attractive, since it would be cheap and fast instead of simply stuck in traffic.

Then I'd jail or execute my political rivals and invade Canada.

You mean like people who want to prevent people from using their public street because it makes it unpleasant to walk the dog?

That's almost the exact opposite argument than you made in your post. You really don't seem to have a coherent point here. Apparently Christians who speak Arabic are perfectly ok using the same word. If they thought that the words had different meanings then they'd try to use different words in Arabic. The fact that they don't shows that your entire claim doesn't work. You seem to be confused about whether "Allah" is a proper noun or a generic. Like the word "God" in English it is both.

Temporary is different from permanent.

That's true in general for speaking in common contexts among Orthodox Jews. But even then, Orthodox people will simply sometimes say "God" in English or whatever the equivalent is in that language. And that's aside from the many less religious Jews who don't strongly have that taboo.

Does it impact your opinion at all to learn that Jews and Christians when speaking Arabic use the word "Allah" to talk about their deity?

I don't know what "hate site" means in general, but that's at minimum a source that has very much already decided on their bottom line http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/, which means one shoudl already take it pretty skeptically. But that list isn't very helpful for a simple reason that it just shows that there are a lot of Islamic terrorist events which isn't terribly helpful: we already know that. The question being asked is how common are they compared to terrorist events motivated by other ideologies or religious traditions.

Getting data on these issues is complicated. If one restricts to the US, then about 10% of all terrorist attacks are Islamic. See http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/muslims-only-carried-out-2-5-percent-of-terrorist-attacks-on-u-s-soil-between-1970-and-2012.html. But not only is this restricted to the US, it uses a very broad notion of what counts as terrorism. If one weighs in the US by total deaths, then Islamic terrorism swamps everything else primarily due to 9/11. Worldwide, about 70% of all terrorist attacks are by Sunni Muslims but this varies from year to year. See for example the 2011 report NCTC report http://fas.org/irp/threat/nctc2011.pdf. Again, definitional issues can move this number up or down by a lot.

Fair question.

People who use JPEG for images with text in them should be burned at the stake, slowly. Partly because it would solve a significant chunk of the population bomb - there are a lot of them around. But mostly because it is just WRONG. However an image handling protocol which can handle text reasonably well and photographic images very well, would be a very good thing.

We have more bandwidth

You clearly don't have to pay for serious bandwidth. If you were running a significant site, you might have remembered re-processing your GIFs to PNGs, partly because of the threat of patent bullshit, and partly to reduce your bandwidth costs. And the effect works in the other direction too - on my work site (currently moving from West Africa to Turkey) we have 1Mbps available for all business and personal purposes of the up to 180 POB (Personnel On Board). That's not going to be upgraded - why would it?) But chopping a considerable chunk off the size of each photographic image loaded would have a considerable effect.

You may not have a use case for this sort of change. But other people do.

As soon as Photoshop and Firefox/Chrome start supporting it I can see widespread adoption.

Irfanview would be the crunch application for me. And yes, I might well make a new payment (I've already brought one copy) if it would fund the writing of the module.

Up to 14 bits/pixel/channel (does that include the alpha-channel? If TFA included it, I missed it.) would certainly be a major step up from 8bppc in JPEG, though I do occasionally handle data from 16bppc astronomical sensors, and I wonder about HDR photography, so I wonder if pushing up to 16bppc is feasible. We do have FITS for handling the astronomical data, and TIFF for medical up-to-32bppc imaging, so it's not necessarily unworkable. Actually, considering that this is, by design, a lossy format ... my worries are a non-issue. For serious work, you'd never use JPEG or BPG or any lossy format.

Bellard seriously knows his coding. Impressive breadth of contributions to the world over the years.