Although most of us only have experience with open source and consumer products, and the support forums that come with them, the OP is most annoyed with niche proprietary software tool vendors:

For these tools, your employer usually pays tens of thousands of dollars for support contracts, which are meant to include direct support from engineers. It's unlikely that any third party will have the ability to provide support for such products, because:

1. You need access to source code and the ability to make changes and release patches.
2. The tools are so niche that you won't be able to find people who know enough about the software to provide support.
3. Even if you could, you need licenses to reproduce the issues that your customers are reporting to you. The cost of licenses for things like Verilog synthesizers from Synopsys (which are not cheap!) would need to be passed on to your customers.

Having lived in both Japan and the US, I've noticed that people in Japan tend to think "living in a small town would be inconvenient because I wouldn't be able to get to a train" whereas people in the US tend to think "living in a big city would be inconvenient because I wouldn't be able to drive my car".

So the Japanese tend to be drawn towards large cities (about 60% live in one of the 3 biggest metro areas - Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya) and Americans tend to self-organize into a fairly uniformly sparse suburban environment.

It's interesting how people can't seem to see beyond their society's local maxima, but anyway this leads to vastly different ideas of what it means to be "overpopulated".

When I lived in Japan I didn't find it to be overpopulated at all, even in the middle of Tokyo. The high population density isn't a problem that needs solving - it's a defining characteristic that makes the city great, and has attracted 35 million people to live there. There are plenty of rural backwaters north of Tokyo in Tohoku but not many people want to live there.

So what for? If a society prefers large cities, why not let them self-organize into a two or three big cities? Which is what Japan has pretty much already done.

Yeah, let's restrict access to scientific knowledge, and make sure those third worlders are stuck in poverty forever. That'll make the world a better place!

I think you're asking the wrong question too. Why should I care what the US GDP per capita is? What matters to me is the global GDP per capita, and how that is distributed.

To be fair, Ford no longer manufactures the Crown Victoria so this is not an option for police departments anymore.

A top-of-the-range SRT Charger costs about $47k MSRP and not all cops are driving around in SRTs (except maybe Highway Patrol?). With the model that the police are buying, together with the "police package", they're paying $42k (according to http://cjonline.com/opinion/20...) and I doubt the Crown Vics would've been much cheaper than that.

Having said that I totally agree with you that US police departments are not allocating resources effectively.

This paper shows the difference between the content of mechanically-separated and hand-separated meats (see tables 2 and 3). There's less protein, and more ash and bone in the mechanically separated stuff, so it is different nutritionally.

Also it's not "half the animal"; the amount of extra meat recovered from mechanical separation is probably only a few percent at most. And anyway, there are other ways to use the rest of the animal, such as making soup stock or bone meal. We wouldn't have to waste anything if we stopped making pink slime.

A good steak really is an amazing thing, and no meat substitute is likely to replace it. A fake meat product that is made from "peas and plants" doesn't sound anywhere near as nice as a rare filet mignon, but it still sounds a lot better than mechanically separated pink slime and the mystery meats that fast food restaurants put in burgers, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, etc.

It's still early days and I'm sure this Beyond Meat product will get cheaper, to the point where this could replace the low-grade meat that is so common in the food industry. This would be a massive win in terms of animal welfare, sustainability, nutrition and maybe even cost to consumers.

I suspect that a lot of people would prefer vegetables that have most of the taste, texture and protein of meat, rather than food that is grown in horrific conditions but technically meets the definition of meat despite being quite different nutritionally.

Maybe the Russians are just writing off their losses? I've got no idea about the terms of the loan, but if someone owed me a ridiculous amount of money that I knew would never be paid back, I'd settle for 10% of it and a commitment to a payment plan.

I'm not sure what the author means when he says that the student was "lost to history", because at the end of the article he says that it was Diane Hartley.

Her name is also mentioned in some papers on engineering ethics:

http://www.onlineethics.org/cm...
http://www.theaiatrust.com/whi...

A cheap car (like a Toyota Corolla or Honda Fit) costs about $5000+/year to own. If you get rid of that car and live in a place where you don't need one (i.e. San Francisco) you've got about $400 extra per month that you can spend on rent. So you don't have to be rich to spend $1900/month, which is plenty if you want to share a 2 bedroom apartment with someone in SF.

http://consumerreports.org/cro...

It's not for everyone but obviously a lot of people like it enough to do just that.

Ah, you're right. I got it mixed up with the "Civic Si" which is a similar but slightly different car.

He imported a Civic, not an Accord. There are two cars called the "Civic Type R", one of which is made in Japan (and also sold in the US) and the other is made in England (and sold in Europe). The former looks like this:

http://www.allvehicles.co.uk/c...

The latter looks like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Really? The Firefox 4 mockup page on their wiki contains some discussion on the Chrome UI, so it seems unlikely that Mozilla had developed something along the lines of the Chrome UI before Google did. Otherwise they could've just referred to their own designs rather than Google's.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk%...

Do you have any links to these pre-Chrome Firefox mockups?

From the article:

If every website had to be set up in a different data center for each country that they served, most websites would not bother setting up in most countries. They'd just set up wherever is most profitable, and forget about the rest. For big sites like Google and Facebook, they might just go and set everything up everywhere, but smaller sites are probably going to be US-only, or China-only, etc.

For examples of this, look at websites that already need to have separate country-specific sites for other reasons. Amazon doesn't need to have servers in each country, but they kind of need to have local warehouses (part of it is to ensure reasonable shipping times, and another part of it is that some companies refuse to ship products overseas). Netflix doesn't need to have servers in each country, but their content is geoblocked in all but a few select countries.

It's bad enough that we have to deal with things like shipping restrictions and content restrictions, but at least this only affects a few web sites. If every single website out there was forced to set up servers everywhere, the reality is that they would just stop serving most countries, and the Internet would fragment into a bunch of country-specific bubbles.