On the bright side, English is a GREAT language for puns due to having a large number of homophones!

I started programming in the '80s, when many companies thought it was a good idea to roll their own scripting languages rather than simply extending BASIC or some existing language. (Hint: creating a new language is a LOT more work than you think it is!) Flash forward to 2012, where are VP of engineering decided to have our QA guy create a new language for writing test scripts "Hey, just use Yacc/Bison and lex/flex... how hard could it be?" Surprise, suprise... they never got it working. Just had a conversation with a recruiter Monday, who told me that had a client working on a mesh network. "Which one, Zigbee of Zwave?" I asked. "Neither. They are inventing their own." was his reply. You are correct, NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is still running strong in engineering. On the bright side, the majority of new products are now based on Linux, which significantly reduces development time.

I hear it is double plus good!

Don't Chinese languages already have that?

My thoughts exactly. A human-spoken language designed from scratch to be simple and easy to learn? It's been done, Esperanto. And, since my mother learned it in the '50s, it's been around for a while. How long have UN documents been available in Eperanto? Been there, done that... Why reinvent the wheel?

Agreed; I've seen good H1-b visa workers subject to exploitative conditions. Working on an H1-B visa is remarkably similar to indentured servitude. While it may be preferable to letting your family starve, you may have to put up with abusive conditions. Also, companies are lying when they say they can't find US workers to do the same job. The problems isn't that US workers are not available, the problem is that US workers are not willing to work as cheaply as the H1-B workers.

We need more foreign engineers, and yet I and many other citizens don't have a job. This isn't about not being able to find qualified people at home. This is about foreign talent being cheaper! And one of the reasons that they are cheaper is that is much more difficult to verify the claims made in their resume/CV if they are from a different country. Granted, some H1-B workers are brilliant, smarter than I am. But I suspect many of them are flat out lying about their experience to get the job, and come from a culture where that is regarded as business-as-usual.

If the government can see MY junk, their spy satellites must have really impressive image magnification! Er... just kidding. Like the Great Wall of China, it's visible from space...

Wait... is this a pterodactyl joke?

"Choosing your battles" is pragmatism, not hypocrisy; Tim Cook is doing the best he can given the circumstances. Don't have much to say about Hillary, except that if she gets the nomination, we will undoubtedly see the worst election in history for personal attacks and outright misrepresentation. The Republicans apparently hate her so much they will stop at nothing to discredit her and see her lose. To them, winning is everything, and it doesn't matter who you have to harm to win. That Hillary still chooses to run despite having a good idea of what is in store for her, says a lot for either her balls or her stupidity, I'm not sure which.

Newer "5K" retina displays are 5120-by-2880, so yes, the horizontal resolution exceeds the limits of human perception. Going higher than that is only useful if you are focusing in on a small subsection of the display, no not useful for most applications.

I'm waiting for OLED UHD displays to drop in price. That's pretty much the point of diminishing returns wherein further improvements in technology don't appreciably improve the picture. 8K displays are useless for most application because human beings can't perceive the difference when the entire screen is in their field of view.

No, higher than 8K has no "visual advantage" due to limits of human perception. See "Angular resolution" in this article: http://io9.com/5926643/10-fund.... Basically, if you can see all 4000 pixels across, you can't distinguish the individual pixels, so adding more resolution doesn't improved the perceived image.

4K is the limit of human visual perception. More than 4K is only useful if you are planning on taking a small section of the image and blowing it up; that's the only time ridiculously high resolution makes sense. So, useful for still images, yes. Useful for a television or tablet screen? I don't think so.

4k is the limit of human perception, i.e. if you can see a line 4000 pixels long, you cannot discern the individual pixels. More than 4K is only useful if you are zooming in on smaller regions of the screen and not viewing the entire image. So yes, more that 4K/UHD isn't useful for a tablet. 4K is the point of diminishing returns; going higher res costs you a lot more in bandwidth and memory without significantly improving your perception of the image. The good news is that once everyone adopts UHD, the standards should stabilize and stop changing, at least for 2D images.