Wingdings is to fonts what VBA/Access is to application development, so I can't say I feel terribly sad about that.

Lords were seeking to extract the greatest possible profit from their serfs too, that is not new. Most all improvements to the life of the common man has been hard fought for at the expense of the rich and powerful. True, it has been quite successful at advancing science and technology but the world would not have stood still on curiosity, ingenuity and altruism either. And lately the trickle down effect that created the middle class has slowed considerably and the rich are again pulling away from the rest, where Marx saw machines and factories it's now software and data centers that generate billions while the jobs are outsourced to the cheapest corners of the earth.

Before they gimped it to match UTF-16 it had ~2^31 combinations, now it has ~2^16. And you could have extended UTF-8 to a full ~2^42 by just continuing the scheme to fill the entire first byte, so space is really of little concern. They probably just don't want to coordinate a million different people who want to add a smiley or their imaginary fantasy language to the standard.

Or simply the ambiguity of the language. If I can get water from my own well I'd probably say I have "free water" even if I once paid someone $300 to dig the well because the marginal cost of another bucket is zero. If there was one or several bids or I did it with $300 worth of my own labor, doesn't really matter. I don't really see a problem with Google saying a $300 one-time fee for "free Internet" service forever after. Certainly if you've already sunk the cost and is selling the house, then it's perfectly legitimate to promote it as free Internet service for the buyer.

You know, in reality we'd probably have a bit more than half a dozen soldiers to fight off an alien invasion. UFO Defense was a lot more about tedium and logistics than actual strategy, okay the soldiers need bullets for their guns but I need to restock them between each mission or they'll forget to bring ammo? That's not the kind of micromanagement I'd like to be doing between researching alien tech, building new and unique equipment and facilities while staving off an alien invasion. I consider the chances in the new X-Com basically to say that for any reasonable engagement, the soldiers will have bullets because practically they'll either kill the enemy or be killed before they run out. The reload time also makes you cut down on the spray-and-pray tactics. Standard issue is maybe 2-3 grenades, I agree it's an oversimplification but it also means you get to pick the pros and cons not just throw whichever grenade is best all the time.

I've been up and down a lot of kilos and quite frankly the more overweight you are, the harder it is to lose weight. While keeping your weight is all about diet, losing weight through under-nourishing yourself is extremely frustrating and slow, with the body constantly nagging you with hunger and being fatigued from lack of the nutrients it can't get from fat. So that's the supply side, on the consumption side it's not much better. When my BMI was closing on 40 my endurance was next to nothing, I'd be exhausted and get pains from wobbling around long before I could burn any significant amount of calories.

Of course I had to stop the overeating that brought me there in the first place, but to go beyond that and get a real deficit going so I could lose weight working out was essential. When you don't work out the body is storing it as fat as quickly as possible to make you hungry again, but when you exercise regularly the body seems to keep more energy around in stand-by. That makes a huge difference in reducing your calorie intake without any herculean feat of will power. Plus carrying that weight becomes so much easier with a little muscle, it won't make you slim but it will make life much easier all the same.

Well, unless you count psychological problems as medical problems like for example depression/bipolar causing binge eating and such. For most it's simply a problem of diet and exercise, but for it's a side effect of a more serious underlying condition.

You're probably not in violation of any law unless there's some bat shit crazy laws about conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Your friend though might be in trouble, depending on how often he provides a "taxi" service to other people. In our tax system the condition (translated) is:

"A sustained activity which is likely to provide net income and operated by the taxpayer at its own expense and risk."

The key points here is
a) Sustained, one-offs or highly irregular activities don't count
b) Provide net income, activities that are mostly a loss are generally not deductible
c) You're not in an employment relationship, you make your own business

This has been applied broadly, if you're a prostitute and make a living from it you're committing tax fraud by not reporting it. Professional poker players have been hit with back taxes. You might say it's crude and after-the-fact but if you lose money it's a hobby, if you make money it's a business. Just like Al Capone they don't need to prove you did anything illegal, only that you failed to pay your income taxes.

Or the TL;DR version: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Companies are not your friends, they're temporary allies as the underdog seeks to become top dog but will abandon you when they no longer need your support. They make more money that way.

Which is why more and more of the essential code goes to live on their servers, not your client. Photos, audio and video are "trivial" in the sense that if you capture the output you're done. Applications and games? It's a cat and mouse game but if "always online single player" wins I think DRM does too.

Most of the new Internet users are now mobile, people get smartphones before they get computers, the cheapest Android phone I could find around here now is $40 with a 240x320 crap screen and they'd still need a cell phone. I don't know and I've never bothered to find out what my IP address is when I'm on the phone. So I figure the Internet will continue to grow, you'll probably pay another $1/month if you want an IPv4 address and a lot of people won't bother. A lot of people don't run servers or host games or use P2P, for example I don't think my parents would notice if they no longer had a public IPv4. As long as they can browse the web and pay their bills and check their email they're happy. And don't forget how many are now using "the cloud", all their own devices are just clients that run client-to-server not peer-to-peer.

Sure, with a $5 monkey wrench you can make someone implement a backdoor, but if the developer never made one and doesn't know of any exploits to produce one then beating him to a pulp won't help him find one. Sure I can't guarantee that I haven't made any big oopsies in my code, but if I did I'm not aware of them and if I found one it'd be patched immediately. I'd never knowingly sit around with an unpatched way to backdoor the system, it can only "extract" things you actually know how to do.

These cards exists because they make them for the compute/workstation/enterprise market, why not rebrand and sell for some insane amount of money? Just like Intel's $999 processors wouldn't exist without the Xeon line. You get plenty bang for the buck for $150-250 with the "normal" enthusiast cards topping out at $500-700, which I assume is not that much more after inflation. Of course if you insist on playing Crysis in UltraHD with everything dialed up to max nothing will be enough, but many games the last years have been console ports that'll run on any half-decent gaming PC.

First of all, they said TrueCrypt has unfixed critical bugs not that it was compromised. It wouldn't really make a lot of sense either, if it was compromised back in 2012 and you wanted to be a whistleblower why wait well over 2 years to do it? It's not like NSA or whomever would let that sort of gag order expire. And if they're under any kind of pressure now, it would be to discredit the software they made years ago that doesn't contain any backdoors. Which brings us over to the next issue, they claim there's critical bugs but they won't tell anyone where they are so others can fix them nor fix them themselves. I mean they don't just want to shut down their project, they want tarnish the name, burn it to the ground and salt the earth after them and you really have to ask: Why?

I don't think and you probably also don't think that it's because XP support has ended and we should now all go use Bitlocker, so they're lying to us now. Why are they lying to us? I don't know, either they're pressured to it or working for commercial alternatives or threw a hand grenade to start conspiracy theories and get everyone reviewing the code or just went plain nuts I don't know. But there's no reason for any agency to kill off a version that has a backdoor and if there really was a government backdoor wouldn't the best way to be a whistleblower be to point it out? Why this ominous yet vague FUD? The answer that makes the most sense is that they're lying about everything. The developers don't know of any critical issues with 7.1a, but they're being pressured to or want to kill it.

That doesn't mean TrueCrypt is bug free, of course it may have bigger and smaller issues. But I think they're lying about knowingly withholding anything, that they're not working on the code and not maintaining it isn't the same as deliberately avoiding fixing issues. If they had said nothing at all and TrueCrypt had stayed at versjon 7.1a for another few years I'd still use it and despite what looks to me like a best effort they can't go back in time and sabotage their old release. So while I wouldn't trust anything they do from now on, the older code looks good. Why else would they go through so much effort to get rid of it? Somebody badly wants TrueCrypt 7.1a to disappear and be abandoned, the question is who and why.

And who'd go around remembering that Twinings is British, Sony is Japanese, Audi is German and so on? If it's sold here, I expect a localized version of their website in my country's domain (even if it's just a redirect to $brand.com/countrycode, as so many do), the country of origin is only marginally interesting. It makes guessing the correct domain harder without the use of Google, not easier.

Let's forbid anyone doing anything about domain squatting. And won't this be massive fun during mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs.

The world and their dog already has a dotcom no matter what, you're trying to clean a pool that has more piss than water in it.

Stop the madness, just accept globalization as a fact and move the whole .com to become root domains at reasonable prices and that's that. Google is just "google", Twinings Tea is just "twinings" and let Apple the computer company and Apple the music company and Apple the produce company fight over who's "apple", absolutely nobody wants their domain name to be some kind of unique categorization down a tree, it's "google" not "google.searchengine". Reserve the two-letter domains as special cases for nations and let the free market settle the rest. Practically there's no problem, are you Tesla building cars? Get teslamotors.com and the whole thing is solved with 99% less drama.