Good luck selling your software to half the population of the USA (much less the rest of the world) when the only language you can use is American English.

Internationalisation and localisation are separate to the issue of source code being able to represent variable names and string constants written in Unicode, eg: "écrire" rather than "ecrire" will keep your French users happier. A variable named fichier_à_écrire might make more sense to a French programmer too (I'm only using Google translate here, I have no idea how to correctly translate "output file").

To insist that the French programmer uses "fichier_a_ecrire" instead would be equivalent to insisting that English speaking programmers use "1" for lower-case L, upper-case I, and the shell "pipe" - hey, they all look the same anyway, right? H0w d1ff1cu1t d0e5 1t need t0 be bef0re y0u rea1i5e that 11m1t1ng character 5et5 15 a 51gn1f1cant hand1cap?

please describe the way you change the volume of the next song, or the volume of the phone call you are currently engaged in, if the reader application has remapped the volume control buttons to be scrolling controls?

Okay, I couldn't resist. But when the best defense you have against falcons is to use falcons yourself, doesn't that mean the falcon is overpowered?

Damned ECM ships.

there is a world of difference between liking computer games more than sex, and not having sex.

It's a faceoff between basement virgins and Warcraft widowers.

Just because you can activate them from anywhere, doesn't mean you can buy them from anywhere. You are limited to buying stuff from the market for your particular region, and while you can view contracts for the entire universe you can only interact with a contract from within the region it was posted.

Some players are too time-poor (or lazy) to fly the 20-odd jumps from their corner of the world to the market hub where PLEX are cheapest today. This is where arbitrage traders come into play - they buy the stuff from the cheapest system, fly the stuff to the most expensive system, make a 10% profit.

What you are suggesting is pretty close to a "Langer Vote" (ie: number the guys you like from 1 to N, fill the remaining boxes wiht N+1). This is specifically legislated against in the commonwealth Electoral Act, 1998 amendments.

When voting "below the line", the numbers must start at 1, they must be consecutive, and all boxes must be numbered. If those simple rules are not followed, the vote is invalid. When voting "above the line" the voter just puts 1 for their preferred party, and the various preferences distribution deals take over to determine the voter's intent independently of the voter.

5MW peak production capacity of the steam turbine, which is only limited by how fast the molten salt can turn water into steam.

So, pump heat into the salt all day while the Sun shines, extract 5MW at peak load when everyone gets home and turns their aircon, TV and kettle on.

Why does the advertiser need to know what other applications I have installed, what my name is, what my credit card number is, how much money I spent in my last bricks-and-mortar store credit card transactions, or how long I spent playing "FarmVille" instead of "Bejewelled Blitz"?

The advertising industry has plenty of avenues to target their ads at people who will be interested in the product being advertised, if (a) the product is worth having in the first place and (b) they study demographics a little more.

Y'know, things like not advertising EVE Online to people browsing the Battleclinic kill boards. No-brainer there.

Ads on my gardening blog are nicely targeted due to the content of my blog - they don't need to know who is reading my blog to know that ads for Organic supplies, produce or how-to books will get clicked on.

The ad industry needs analytics like kids need added sugar.

Yes, let's solve an ecological disaster of human timescale by introducing an ecological disaster of geological timescale! Nuke the ocean floor! What could possibly go wrong?

First, get the right nuke. It has to work under a mile of sea water, it has to be remotely triggered, it has to be deployed in a way that someone else can't sneak in there and steal it, it has to be (relatively) clean, or at least pose less of a threat to the environment than a mere million gallons of crude oil, and ideally it wouldn't cause a tidal wave when we set it off, nor will any of the shockwaves (surface rock, deep ocean, ocean surface) or radiation pose a threat to the other oil rigs in the vicinity.

There's also a short story (which I sadly can't find at this point) about a physicist who is visited by a guy from the future to warn him not to marry the girl he's keen on, since their son will become a biologist and end up developing a strain of bacteria which will eat oil spills. Except it turns out that the bacteria like plankton more than oil, and the Earth's ecosystem is plummeted into ruin.

Catch is the physicist's girlfriend has an identical sister, and although the physicist promises guy-from-the-future that he won't marry his girlfriend, he starts thinking about marrying the twin sister instead, and he has trouble telling them apart at the best of times...

Flash on the iPhone would be like Java on desktops - you get to run the same crappy, poorly designed applications on all platforms, using a UI that is inconsistent with every platform you use it on. In addition to that, Flash is a security hole and a processor hog, designed for an interface where mousing is assumed.

Start eating your words, since anyone can get the iPhone SDK and start writing apps for their own phone (and distribute to 99 of their closest friends). Alternately you can push those apps out to the phones in your business without going through the App Store.

I like how you've conveniently ignored the fact that Flash can display H.264 video.

Why would anyone spend time reviewing a product which only 90 people are interested in?

Fructose bypasses the sucrose breakdown chain, a byproduct of which reaction tells the body, "I've had enough thanks."

Sweetening things with fructose in stead of sucrose therefore does exactly the opposite of regulating hunger. You have to eat more before you feel full - and then it's only because your stomach says, "no more", not because your blood chemistry says, "enough sugar". Enough of that behaviour and your stomach will stretch to suit the normal gorging that you engage in (or you explode like Mr Creosote).

You do need to cut high fructose out of your diet completely if you want to dramatically reduce your food consumption. Simply switch to foods that are sweetened with sucrose instead of fructose and your body will take care of the rest.

Note that "sugar" on the ingredients label doesn't always mean "sucrose".

Ketchup will keep for a long, long time. In a bottle, in the fridge, I've had sauces keeping nicely for years. Except plain tomato sauce, which goes off so fast you can barely get the lid back on the jar before it's started to go mouldy.