And apparently Korean's even weirder. (I'm going by my childhood memories of my mom describing her job translating Korean during the early 50s. Unfortunately, I don't think she still has her books on basic Chinese characters these days, though I could just as easily find them in a bookstore around here.)

Some parts of Silicon Valley have a lot of Korean restaurants. I don't think I've seen any Chinese characters on their signs or menus, just alphabetic Korean.

Even using vector fonts doesn't fix the problem that Unicode wasn't a great solution for managing the diversity of characters in many Asian languages.

Yeah, too much seaweed might be bad for you. Too much bacon is also bad for you, between the fats and the salt and the nitrates or other curing chemicals and the other dead pig parts that you eat to make up for getting the bacon. You probably shouldn't overdo either one.

Of course, frying the seaweed in cooking fat probably brings it more into balance with bacon's nutrition-to-bad-stuff ratios. And even then, it's probably better for you than those fake bacon bits you get in a shaker bottle.

I'm a vegetarian, and while I thought bacon was ok back when I ate meat, it wasn't all that exciting; it's not like it was a good steak or even a good breakfast sausage or country ham. Sorry if FARK and the pork marketers tell you differently :-) But yeah, dulse is good, and a more bacony dulse would be fun to try.

And most veggie burgers need all the help they can get. (Some are good - I got a vegan burger at a concert the other week, and either it was the best imitation cooked beef I've ever had, or the person behind me was really disappointed to get my vegan burger instead of their meat burger.)

Doesn't matter whether they use security-by-obscurity or real hardware-driven or OS-driven encryption. The malware's running on top of the OS, which already has access to all the data on the drive (unless you're doing something fancy with multiple user logins, each of whom has differently-encrypted home directories, but even then, the malware can attack whoever's logged in right now.)

Drive encryption mainly helps you against stolen hardware, and not usually very much, because that would require an inconvenient user interface.

It has an SSD daughter card on the motherboard. (As I ranted above, three different generations of them had three different interface formats, but to be fair, the market was changing rapidly.) There's no room for a 2.5" drive. There are probably other ultra-thin notebooks with that limitation as well.

My wife's Lenovo laptop power connection fried recently, and we got to discover the joys of different SSD formats. The first generation X1 Carbon had a Sandisk 20+6 format, and I think the second was M.2 and the third some mSATA format, but I may have the latter two backwards. After looking around online for a while, I found a $25 adapter board from China that lets you plug in the 20+6 drive so you can read it on a "standard" SATA connector, so we were able to back up the data before sending it in for (Yay! Just under the deadline!) warranty repair.

(We even got lucky, either they didn't need to replace the motherboard after all, or they did replace it with the same kind and the old SSD worked, or they replaced both and really transferred everything; in any case there's still an operating system and her data. I really wish Apple would lease their magnetic-connector power cord patent cheaply enough that everybody would use it, since it prevents all kinds of damage.)

"My Documents"/prog/nethack on my laptop is about 7MB, including a bunch of bones files and a saved game or two...

But yes, bigger hard drives can be useful. My last laptop refresh at work went from a 300GB rotating hard disk to a 256GB SSD, and I had to move my music and Linux ISOs to an external drive. (Eventually I added a 128GB SDXC card, but the news keeps saying that the latest iTunes has serious bugs, so I haven't reinstalled it yet.)

The hidden costs are in the "lease them like any other vehicle" part. It's the difference between "it costs you $X/month" and "Ok, $X/month, and $ZZZZ upfront, and Y cents/mile if you drive too far any month, and here's what you pay us at the end of your lease" and also "$WWWWW out the door, the vehicle's actually yours now."

While we're talking about monoliths, I don't usually build my Linuxes from scratch - I either use Ubuntu, or occasionally a Red Hat version, or sometime soon one of those cloud-vm-thingies. (I also run Raspberry Pi, but I don't expect it to have a full-sized kernel.) So when will Ubuntu start supporting the newer kernels? 15.10, or some updates to 15.04?

Until recently, production electric cars cost way too much, even when you figure you're saving most of the cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car. (A 50-mpg Prius will use about $20k in gas over 200-250k miles; a 20mpg minivan will use about $50k, so I guess you can justify that Tesla if you were going to buy a gas-guzzler and didn't need the space.) Hobbyist electric cars can cost a lot less, if you want to do all the labor to retrofit a very used car with electric motors and batteries, but I don't.

But even now that prices are coming down, the range on the lower-cost cars isn't enough for me. It's fine for going to the grocery store, but my office is 40 miles away, and so is The City, so on the days I'm not telecommuting or want to go into the city for something, I need a guaranteed range of over 100 miles so I'm not worried about having to coast home on electron vapors or stop for half an hour at a charging station if there wasn't one near my destination. Battery range declines as the batteries get older, so that means I'd probably need a 150-mile range when it's new to be sure I can get to work when it's older.

Maybe a couple of years from now it'll make sense to buy an electric car; we'll see how long my wife's car lasts, and whether it's worth getting an electric when we need to replace it. The real cost includes adding an extra electric meter and 240v power to my garage space and the cost of storing the stuff that's currently in my garage, because Silicon Valley real estate is too expensive to actually use a garage for putting cars in...

Unfortunately, most lower-cost electric today talk about monthly lease prices, and hide all the other costs; one of the ones that was advertised on the radio did mention something around $5K up-front and 25 cents a mile if you drive over 10,000 miles a year - the reason I'd be buying an electric car is to make my commuting cheaper, and my gasoline car currently costs about 25 cents a mile (10 cents amortizing the purchase price over 200k miles, 15 cents for gas.)

Snowden deserves asylum - he's wanted for a political crime, he's clearly guilty of violating US laws, and the US government doesn't accept a necessity defense when they're the ones he blew the whistle on, and even if he got a jury trial they'd make sure no juror who supports him would be picked.

Assange is a different case - the US wants him for political reasons, but Sweden wants him on trial for rape. There's a significant risk that if he goes back, gets a fair trial, and is found not guilty, the US will kidnap\\\\\\extradite him so they can try him for political crimes, and asylum would be appropriate then. But it's not appropriate now.

Yeah, the secret hacking method turned out to be "roll two 6-side dice, if you get over 10, you break in, under 6 and you're BUSTED."

Can't tell your boss you made that dumb a mistake, so you've got to escalate the charges somehow.