It sounds like their mistake was not telling the shareholders "either pony up now to cover all of the legally-required costs of the layoff, or liquidate now and realize the assets will go to those we owe money to, including the employees. The choice is yours."

If France had American-style bankruptcy laws they could've filed for chapter 11 and reorganized, jettisoning the debt owed to former employees or at worst, making them accept stock in the "new" company instead of cash.

Obviously it doesn't run the 32-bit version of Windows 8, but does it at least crawl it?

Actually, easier than all this.

First let's take the government OUT of the business of preventing people from doing stupid things or hurting themselves.

I think we've long been thwarting natural selection...by saving people from their own stupidity.

1. Make suicide legal. If someone wants to off themselves, why not let them? The ultimate in freedom of choice.

2. Legalize ALL drugs. If someone wants to smoke crystal meth all day long and shoot heroin by night to sleep...let them. They won't be on the longevity list long.

3. Longevity is not a right. If you work hard, save and can afford it...then you get it, but the govt doesn't subsidize the lazy and stupid to live overly long lives. You may get foodstamps, but that doesn't entitle you to longevity treatments. That comes out of YOUR pocket.

4. People that want to gang bang and shoot each other for territory, etc....give them territories to do so, and let them go with impunity. We almost pretty much do this now, it just isn't officially sanctioned. Let idiots kill themselves for stupid shit. Just contain it away from nomal citizenry.

It is a good balance between getting a good 3rd, 4th and 5th and not getting too complex. You have to go to 29-TET before you get a better perfect 5th and 41-TET to get a better major 3rd. Gets a little complex musically to represent and deal with all that, not to mention design instruments that can play it back.

So remember that ultimately music is all math, and as such some things do end up being "better" than others musically. I'm not saying we shouldn't have the capabilities to use other scales, I mean computers are more or less unbounded in their capabilities and samplers can microtune to any required setup, but 12-TET has a reason for its prevalence.

Most kids are never taught to write well enough to later write a novel. That requires much more dedication and skill building. Heck, most people have trouble composing a cogent comment on Facebook.

  It would be great if we taught all school children to think logically and in an ordered manner such that coding were the next practical step. But ... have you ever been outside your own home? As it is now, coders self-select. We should not make the mistake to assume that a high level of success among a self-selected population would translate into a high level of success among the general population. And I can see why government schools may not be keen on teaching everybody critical thinking skills.

Why is chemistry of any practical use to anyone but anyone but a chemist?

Some basic knowledge is helpful for things like cleaning, cooking and building bo ... err ... homemade fireworks.

Sodar, not sonar.

You have to read The Postmortal by Drew Magary, a SF book which brings up most of those points after the invention of a simple drug that simply stops ageing. With huge societal consequences.

Oh yeah, like the 'miracle' cure for hepatitis C recently invented, which cures 99% of patients who were previously incurable ? In my country it's priced at 60k$ per patient, as a surefire way to bankrupt the healhcare system. It wouldn't even surprise me if the pill cost 1$ to manufacture. It's not like there are alternatives.

If your chocolate is solid enough not to require a spoon because that's how it crumbles, it's not pure enough!

I prefer bars of sintered cocoa powder.

If you compose music on a computer, you almost certainly still do it with MIDI. All the new highly advanced synths and samplers still use MIDI as their input for data. Everything from big dollar stuff like Native Instruments Komplete down to freeware. MIDI goes in, sound comes out.

In some ways it surprises me since you'd think they would get around to improving it (there are some things MIDI leaves to be desired) but on the other hand it does work well for nearly everything and there's something to be said about keeping things standard. You can literally take one of those old General MIDI songs and feed the data in to a modern sampler. I do just that all the time to remake old game soundtracks because I enjoy it.