Apart from this, however, English has a lot of good things going for it. First of all, it is a "mutt language" being a primarily Germanic language (with some Celtic remnants) with a massive Latin influence (via French) . Other languages either de-Germanized (like French) during the Roman empire to become fully "latinized" or remained on the other side of the border (actually pretty cool that the linguistic borders still follow the borders of the Roman empire).

This gives it a unique advantage compared to many languages, and in addition to that the very pragmatic and tolerant attitude within English-speaking cultures towards its language and towards non-native speakers of it is really a great feature for an international language. In fact, many international companies have "Bad English" as company language (which often means that native Brits with peculiar accents need to slow down during meetings... Americans can normally speak like they always do).

If we are to play "how should we change the way we communicate", I would rather like to rally against the standard alphabets and propose strict phonetic spelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) with a possible augmentation using notations to indicate emphasis and melody. This would put the spoken language first and the written second with some clear advantages (especially for dyslectics). Closely related languages like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish would basically be groups of dialects with no clearly defined official borders (now with official spelling rules, the written variants of those languages look quite different). Litterature would be given an entirely new dimension where people easily can read exactly how things should be pronounced in different dialects or even made-up languages. (I remember being a bit annoyed about not being able to imagine how the dialect written out in the Innocent Mage books actually should be pronounced/sound like, which probably required some native English cultural background).

Well... in fact having a diversity can be pretty good. A lot of our thought process is based on associations and if you know a couple of languages (for me Swedish, English, Dutch and German - in order of proficiency) you also know that nuances are very hard to translate - there is simply no 1:1 perfect relationship between certain concepts within different languages. Those ambigous meanings and cultural associations are a fundamental part of the thought process. I am all for having English as a "lingua franca" and it should definitely be considered a second official language in most countries (especially within the EU institutions). On the other hand, there is a great strength in having different frameworks to form your thoughts in and, given this perspective, coming from a different language is clearly an advantage.

I found it strange that an aim in the roadmap was to support the latest GNU binutils [1].. I hope they are trying to adress that piece of GNU dependency too. There is the FreeBSD-project libelf/elftoolchain [2, 3] that could be interesting... [1] https://www.bitrig.org/index.php?title=Roadmap [2] http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf [3] http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/elftoolchain/

As a European citizen (Swede) working in another country (Belgium), I have often felt that there are a couple of things that actually would do well to get centralized at a EU level. One such thing would be the social security number. All the sillyness that you have to go through before you get a local ID card and then that you have to carry two ID cards, one for each country, makes it rather strange. Especially upon repatriation when social security is transferred and you somehow have to show that the person with one ID is the same as the one with the other ID. There are several other examples of stuff that are still national that simply would be better to put at a federal level (and other things that would be better to transfer down to regional level).

I wish we had a set of permissively licensed libraries for Linux that would make it possible to produce statically linked proprietary programs. Those would never have had the issues with old library dependencies and such... in fact the longer I think about it the more I get convinced that the development of dynamic linking was a big mistake (fuelled back in the days by the requirements of X) - the whole DLL/.so/whatever dependency hell would not have existed if everything was statically linked.

export FAVORITE_TOOL_OF_POSTER=acme

Using phages as treatment would be awesome! My main concern about the old-school antibiotics is their lack of specificity and with the rise of metabiomics, it is getting more and more apparent that the complex flora of bacteria in our gut regulates a lot of our physiology and psychology (in fact, the gut is one of the most neuron-dense organs sometimes called the "second brain"). Secondly, phages are open for genetic design so we could further improfe their efficiency, specificity and safety as treatment. I really wish that some real effort would be put into this kind of drug development. There are interesting correlations between excessive antibiotics use (in some regions the prescribe antibiotics even against stuff not caused by bacteria, which is just crazy) and a wide range of health problems.

What has been discovered lately is that we have a very complex ecosystem of bacteria in our gut and only a small fraction of those bacteria can be cultured (which caused an underestimation of the complexity). Thanks to the high-throughput sequencing technologies of today, we now have a far better idea of this complexity, which will give us a better idea of which specific species that may be useful for treatments. Unappealing as it may be, we will have to accept "shit transplants" until we figure out a way to identify and culture those specific bacteria that we need to transplant.

What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?

In comparison to the Trusted Computing, this embedding of IE10 in Win8 is the lesser of Evil Plans. If regulators should be looking at something, it would be to require that OEMs allow their consumers to unlock the computers and add new security certificates. Otherwise we might get a situation where it is VERY difficult to install something different on a "Win8 certified" computer. This might not be a problem for those already in the game (there would brobably be ways to "root" the computers the same way one now has to jump through hoops to install something different on a phone), but for the curious starting with a dual boot with Ubuntu, this could be a huge issue.

Hans Rosling got some really interesting statistics on population growth ( http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html ) and a number of other issues related to this on TED ( http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html ). His basic message is that the world has turned a lot better and that the average child/woman already is decreased to sustainable levels in most countries that previously were poor and suffered from overpopulation. In fact, the division "developed" versus "developing" countries and the accompanying fear of overpopulation is a heritage from how it looked in the 70:s. Personally, I just marvel at the possibillities. Never before have as many people been able to realize their potential as today. If we assume that the birth of a great genious (an Einstein, Mozart...) is of a certain low probability, and that on top of that that this genious would be born under such circumstances that it would survive and have the means to realize its potential, we can assume that we actually have more of those in our current society than ever before. As a side note.... this is also why I find the whole religious "stuff that are old must be true" a very strange point of view - by virtue of better education and more accumulated experience (exteligence), I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.

Indeed... I am currently living in Belgium and did not know that there was an ISP DNS block to the pirate bay (I just checked again and it worked)... coincidentally I am using the google DNS:es. It seems like a rather toothless way of blocking access to a specific site.

and LLVM

Perhaps the return of Inferno and the Dis VM? It was the original competitor of Java and we could always dream about it having a comeback (perhaps with an update of Limbo to Go or similar). There is already the Android variant replacing the Dalvik VM with Inferno (the Hellaphone)...

It might be different now, but before the NDK / bionic libc had issues with C++