If the Chinese language is really such a notoriously difficult language to learn (and to speak) there ought to be no one using it anymore, right?

Wrong.

When we're young, we benefit from massive plasticity in our language learning skills, and of course any child who learns Mandarin (and sometimes Cantonese as well) is going to make a much better native speaker than I am ever going to make, despite the fact that I've devoted years to it and am highly motivated.

It's not just learning words. It is how things are said, references to metaphors and myths and such, and the fact that it is not a "spelled" language; the characters you're familiar with each represent a word part or a word that means one thing on its own, often something else in combination, and very few of them are used the way we use them in western speech. About 2000 of them constitute (approximately) high school literacy. But there are about 50 thousand of them. Bad enough? Oh no. A while back, Those In Power decided they were to o hard, so they "simplified" a bunch of them. Great, right? So you only have to learn the simplified ones, right? Wrong. The traditional ones are everywhere, and plus, some places in asia use the old ones, not the new ones. And then...

(Very) simple example. In English, I I ask you if you want soup, you might say "No." Easy, right? So you how to say no, (Bu Shi) Now you know what to say if I ask you about the soup and you don't want it, right? Wrong. In Mandarin, the question of if you want it is composed, literally, "want not want", (yao bu yao) to which you are expected to answer either "not want" or "want." (Bu yao) or (yao). And down the rabbit hole we go. :)

Trust me. As an adult English speaker, you go into learning Mandarin thinking it's easy, you're in for a serious encounter with your limitations.

No, but there's 137 people who can each legitimately say "If I hadn't put my machine in the trash, I'd be $900k-ish richer". And I'm not sure how quick the value drops off but I doubt going from 63 to 200 machines (about 3x) would be worse than inverse square so (1/3)^2 * $900k = $100k/machine, that's also a nice chunk of cash.

You old people crack me up.

No, honestly, you arrived pre-cracked.

It may well, somehow, be our fault that you are cracked, but it an absolute certainty that our habits of actually talking to people are superior to yours of sitting at a table or walking down the street with your friends, looking only at your phones, as you busily talk to anyone but the people you're actually with.

Among the healthy and mature, there's no right "not to be offended"; not for men, and not for women. There is 100% equality here.

Such offense is subjective; every possible attempt to minimize it by law boils down to an unworthy suppression of freedom, something that is unhealthy for society no matter how you go about it.

Even when a particular mode of speech, or some consensual/personal action, is pretty much uniformly despised, it's far better to know who says, and therefore has motivation to say, or does, these terribly offensive things, than it is for society to repress these people and then jump up in stark surprise when they move from unseen and unheard to resentful action as a means of kicking back against said repression.

Speech, in many cases, serves as a moderately effective safety valve. You never want to close such a valve and walk away. Because you get this.

If something you look at offends you, look away. If something you hear offends you, stop listening. If something people do offends you, don't participate. Your subjective feelings of offense can never rise to the relevance required to legitimately regulate the behavior of others.

Until something breaks your bones, damages your property/finances, or impugns your reputation, or these things similarly directly affect those for whom you perform the role of parent or guardian, the correct action is to turn to managing your own sensibilities -- rather than trying to control other people's actions.

Now, as to the immature and incompetent, in particular, children: Parents and guardians have a dual responsibility here. In order to be able to execute that responsibility, your home should be a safe haven in the sense of you being able to completely control who, and what information, gets in, and when they get in, and when they must leave. Society owes it to you to see to it that this capacity is readily available to you. Your home should indeed be your castle. To the extent it isn't, society has either failed you, or you have failed your charges. Schools and/or any other situation requiring attendence must likewise be supportive and safe, or society has lost its legitimate right to force your children to attend.

Immaturity:

On the one hand, it is your responsibility to see to it that your charges are not bullying, generally or specifically being an asshole to others. You are responsible for inculcating the understanding that immature and/or insufficiently abled minds can be taken to, and beyond, the brink by bullying, and then you must see to it that this understanding translates into reasonable behavior by your charges (which, by the way, will work to reduce many types of essentially pointless trolling later on.)

On the other, it is also your responsibility to see to it that your charges are not being bullied. You should know where your charges hang out, who they hang with, what the environment is like, and you should step in when that environment, in your estimation, becomes unhealthy. Stepping in may involve a note to someone else's parent or guardian, removing your charge from the harmful environment, or simply providing sufficient perspective so that the behavior is seen in the light of failure of the perpetrator, rather than any kind of lessening of the value or self-image of the target.

Incompetence:

If your charge cannot be taught to healthily handle the speech, displays, or consensual actions of others, then it is your job to see to it that they are not exposed to those things. It is not society's responsibility to turn the entire planet into a padded room for your charge. If you need a padded room, you should build one of your own.

For every story I have heard so far of horrible consequences to bullying, my reaction has been "Where were the parents during all this?"

And I have to ask: If your charges are not being raised with healthy self-images and a strong sense of self, what the fuck are you doing? And why are you doing it? Why are you such a totally shitty parent or guardian? And why do you expect the rest of us to compensate for your failures?

Again, these people's abject failure at parenting does not rise to the level of telling everyone else they can't call someone something when, in fact, it is pretty apparent that something is called for.

Having said that, most online forums and comment sections are not public operations. They're private. And in that role, they have both the power and the right to monitor and control the content and activity on that forum. If you invite people to spend time in what pretty much amounts to an environment you created, then you'd better tell them up front what the limits, if any, are for that environment, and see to it that you are accurate about it. If (points at facebook) you allow your operation to get too large or otherwise out of your effective control, I really don't see how that absolves you in any way from being absolutely clear to all participants that you are not, in fact, able to guarantee any particular kind of environment or control what is going on. And no, burying such things in a veritable tar pit of legalese doesn't suffice. Be plain; be clear; let no user into your "thing" without a road sign that says "alligators!" or whatever else it needs to say. Because it does need to be said.

The very idea of freedom requires a concomitant effort to ensure a competent citizenry. If you create a nation of pearl-clutchers, you will have created an environment where repression is the always go-to of the regulators. To some extent, this is already happening, particularly in nations like England, which has pretty much fallen off the wagon of sanity and is busily engaged in chewing its own tail off. It would be lovely if the USA didn't follow them any (or at least much) further down that road.

utopia = ideal, perfect state
unicorn = magical, legendary creature

I think you'd roll your eyes too if Apple or Microsoft came out with OS X 10.10 "Magic Perfection" or Windows 10 "Magic Perfection", respectively. It's the kind of name that makes you go "Okaaaaaaaaay, are you overcompensating for something?"

Not a whole lot of people I knew and having your own hosting and domain costs a bit, most used third party blogs and forums anyway. And it all lacks authentication and aggregation. Sure, you could set up users and accounts and manage all that but people wouldn't bother to manage 100 separate accounts the way they have 100 friends on one Facebook login. And unless every site it set up with an RSS feed there's no easy way to aggregate lots of blogs and give you one dashboard of what your friends are doing. Nothing really unsolvable though, you could have self-hosted for yourself and third party hosted nodes for other people but there'd have to be a business model for the hosting companies. People generally won't pay when they can get a "free" account on Facebook so then most are really back to ads or data mining for most people anyway.

You're quite right that roads will need to be upgraded to provide telemetry to autonomous cars, and this will happen gradually over many, many decades.

Didn't say that, didn't mean to imply it, and don't believe it. Other than that, no. :)

The only way a car can be designed to safely self-drive is doing it just the way we do: by creating a local, up-to-date mapping of the surrounding area in real time and working within that representation with sufficient skill to respond to anything that might appear.

Pre-existing environmental mapping simply cannot keep up. Construction, pets crossing the road, wild animals, falling rocks, pedestrians, vandalism of road signs and traffic indicators and lane painting, washouts, drunks, heart attacks, stinging insects, oversize loads swinging around traffic lights and signs, special transports, some guy at the side of the road madly waving a hand-printed sign that says "BRIDGE IS OUT!"... the list of unpredictable effects upon the local driving environment seems almost endless -- and keep in mind these things can occur in combinations of more than one type and more than one incident. Often suddenly.

Further, if the car is smart enough to be capable of updating the environmental map in real time and deal with any combination of changes, then it's already smart enough to maintain a completely dynamic local mapping and doesn't need a pre-existing mapping for anything but gross navigational purposes (route planning) and even that can require the vehicle to adapt.

Contrariwise, if it isn't smart enough to maintain a full local environmental mapping, then it is inherently unsafe.

Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.

They all have your data, they can do whatever the f... they want with it. Unless you're talking about a client backdoor to access all the other files you didn't want to share with the cloud, but I don't think any of the others are any better. If you want real control, it's ownCloud or no cloud I think...

More like you accuse someone of defamation and it's the difference between "He told people I'm an asshole" and "He told people I'm a child molester". Both are defamatory statements by definition "1. (Law) injurious to someone's name or reputation)" but only one is actually illegal. Even if you're selling a polished turd you can make a lot a objectively highly questionable praise, misleading statistics and lies by omission without actually incriminating yourself. Like the defamation example above, you usually have to be caught in a factual lie in order to be convicted. Every sales pitch strategy I've been involved in involved pushing our strengths and concealing our weakness, if that was illegal we'd have to put all of marketing and sales in jail. And every person who went on a date ever. Meaning /. won't change much, I guess.

Assuming the need is infinite, if your demands are satisfied you might turn to flexibility and convenience. Last quarter we here in Norway saw a tiny dip in fixed residential broadband for the first time ever, whether that's a fluke or not is uncertain but business lines have been on the decline for some time because small 1-5 man shops use 3G/LTE to check their mail rather than having a dedicated broadband line in the office. It's just an extension of that most "normal" people I run into use wireless now instead of wired networks because it's capped by their Internet speed anyway. And even if you gave them gigabit Internet, they'd probably still feel wireless was fast enough.

No one should have a "right to not be offended." Being offended is subjective. It has everything to do with you as an individual, or as part of a collective, or a group, or a society, or a community; it varies due to your moral conditioning, your religious beliefs, your upbringing, your education; what offends one person or group (collective, society, community) may not offend another; and in the final analysis, it requires one person to attempt to read the mind of other persons in order to anticipate whether a specific expression or perception will cause offense in the mind of another. And no, codifying an action in law is not in any way sufficient... it is well established that not even lawyers can know the law well enough to anticipate what is legal, and what is not. Sane law relies on the basic idea that we try not to risk or cause harm to the bodies, finances and reputations of others without them consenting and being aware of the risks. Law that bans something based upon the idea that some group simply finds expression objectionable is the very worst kind of law, utterly devoid of consideration or others, while absolutely permeated in self-indulgence. It is, in the end, something that encourages weak-mindedness.

Conversely, when people are truly harmed (not just offended) without their informed consent (and legitimate defense is not the cause), then the matter is one that should arguably be considered for law. Otherwise, no.

Your story depicts consequences of concerted psychological warfare upon an incompetent individual. Harm is possible. informed consent is not. Special care that does not apply in general society is called for. This is why your example completely fails to make your point. What applies to competent individuals is not particularly relevant to what applies to those not competent, whether that be because they are biologically deficient, or simply too immature to attain that level of sophistication.

What you want, in the end, is that no one can be offended by expression or perception within the context of normal society. If you allow society to pursue this course, you will end up being unable to express yourself, for I guarantee you that almost anything you can say or do will offend someone, and likely grievously so.

Either you take the attitude that others must deal with the ideas expressed to them or within their ken, or you begin to muzzle yourself -- and everyone else. Benefits would definitely accrue to those who wish to be coddled, but everyone else will suffer. Free expression is important. It is definitely more important than the possibility that someone, or many someones, might be offended. If that's not how you see it, then we have no common ground where a meeting of minds could take place on this issue.

This. Actual stamps is mostly a consumer thing, I just checked our commercial postal service and they recommend a "stamping" machine if you send more than 40 letters/week where you charge it up like a prepaid cell phone, same thing for packages except there they normally print to labels they slap on the package. And for the big companies you get bulk pre-printed envelopes with logo that are collected at your place of business and charged to your corporate account, we have those at work. The potential for abuse is small since you can't drop them off at a regular mailbox and it'd be obvious who you're using to pay for your postage. A lot of the consumer-to-business mail is prepaid and rolled into the cost of business too, the few times I use stamps is to other people but most of that is replaced by email since you don't need a formal signature on anything. I guess there's the odd package, but if it's too big to fit a mail box you're going to the post office anyway.

Of the "let's frame it and put it on a wall" more than "I want one in my pocket" variety. I'll always have fond memories of Nokia 3210 and the state of the art in 1999, but it's not selling a new phone and it's not quite up to collectible/antique standards either. And Elop's little stunt sure didn't help Nokia's reputation as a has-been either. Not to mention that Nokia running Windows Phone might have some of the same hardware but there's very little in common between "old Nokia" and "new Nokia" anyway. I think this was a pretty easy call of Microsoft and would have happened regardless, if they'd ponied up a little more they could have gotten the Nokia name for good as it matters more to consumers than the commercial market the remains of Nokia serves.

Because Facebook is really interested in their stock value and not kicking the DEA in the teeth? They're not going to win any favors with anybody for actively sabotaging a criminal investigation, even an illegally conducted one. They want to have the public on their side which is why we're hearing about this in the news, Facebook couldn't win an escalating conflict with proxies and whatnot. If this becomes a big enough PR problem for the police though, the practice might go away.