I'm pretty sure most font systems already DO do this.

Usually not the font systems themselves, as the font system API needs to be designed to let you use fonts in the way that suits your application, and not have random substitutions happen behind your back (though the font system provides the API functions to figure out what a good substitution font will be). But higher level UI libraries, like GTK, Qt, MFC, Windows Forms,Core Text, Skia etc will do it.

one can almost always treat utf8 as a byte stream. except in the rare case where one needs to know where character boundaries are.

UTF-8 is designed to be treated as a byte stream - even when detecting character boundaries. If a byte is >0x7F and <0xC0, then it is not a character boundary. If you want to be really strict, filter out the invalid bytes (0xC0, 0xC1, >0xF4), then everything else is a character boundary.

Too late, Kim Jong Un ordered the general who bought the HP printer to be executed already, and ordered his brother to buy a Canon inkjet to replace it. The brother was also executed for bring imperialist Japanese goods into Korea, but at least they have a new national printer now. Both the PCs are now being studied by North Koreas elite hacking squad to see if the files can be removed without recompiling the whole system from scratch, but the results are not promising so we may see more outage on the North Korean netblock again this week.

You really shouldn't link so brazenly to hackers' command-and-control servers on a public forum like this. Someone might get hurt.

Try burning your country's flag in public sometime, and ask the same question of the police officers who will undoubtedly show up.

Even before this attack, there wasn't a single mainstream publication in the U.S. or Europe that would dare publish any depiction of Mohammad, or probably even any criticism of him. These terrorists were just eliminating one of the few remaining forums that was still willing to take on Islam.

Drawing depictions of Mohammad is not "taking on Islam". It is trolling. There is no purpose to it other than baiting the nutjobs that would murder your whole office for the offense you cause them.

By the time they got to multi-core, Intel had moved to a RISC architecture internally anyway.

The NSA could make themselves useful for once, and set up a competing decryption service to drive the price down.

$5 WiFi SoCs are not everything.

Also, there are 39 countries with a higher net migration rate than the US.

I'm guessing that due to economies of scale, the more popular and longer routes are run more, so since there's more of them and more competition, they drive the prices down on them. The shorter in-between flights aren't as popular so they are more "Specialized" and cost more?

From the article, it seems to be the opposite. A trunk route has high demand, so prices are set high. For a shorter flight on a less popular route, the airline might be having trouble filling the plane, so gives big discounts to attract more customers, including on multi-leg journeys that include that popular trunk route. It can also happen where an airline without a direct route between two points offers a better price on a two-leg flight to try to pull customers away from other airlines. I remember a few years ago reading an article about this happening in Europe, where the cheapest flights between London and Frankfurt were on Air France (via Paris) and KLM (via Amsterdam), and the price was cheaper than either leg of the flight if purchased alone.

So had sycodon been pilot, we would have been picking up the remains of two plane loads of passengers right now, due to a mid-air collision between his plane and the one that was flying an intersecting course at 34000 feet at the time air traffic control denied permission to climb from 32000 to 38000 feet.

Dunno, but it seems that more automation leads to more problems.

Statistically, 2014 is the year with fewest plane crashes since the era of mass aviation began. Two of those were (Boeing, not Airbus) 777s loaded with passengers, which skewed the passenger death statistics to a level that has not been seen for 10 years or so, but as more automation comes into aviation, the trend is definitely leading to fewer problems, not more, more so if you account for the fact that the number of flights and passengers is continuing to grow, especially in areas like South East Asia.

If I have the time to spare I sometimes enjoy taking the train, fx from Amsterdam to Brussels.... But on time plane wins almost always.

Could you have picked a worse example? That train ride is less than the 2 hours that you are recommended to be at checkin before an international flight from a busy airport like Schiphol. Just getting from downtown Amsterdam to the airport has already lost you 30 minutes.

Why is this on Slashdot?

Ever considered the possibility of a software bug that strikes under certain input conditions at the very moment a plane crosses the equator? I know there was a similar issue caught early in the development of the F16 (under simulation), but is there a possibility of such a bug making it into production if the input conditions were rare enough?