You'd have to be a certain size to have the resources to mount the attack, to defend from counter attack, and to settle out of court when you (inevitably) attack an innocent target by mistake.

I'd be happy with a pill I could pop in the morning, or a drink I guess. Just something that means I have everything I need and don't need to eat again that day. I waste so much time eating.

For some reason this seems to be the way renewable levels are always quoted. Scotland plans to be 100% renewable by 2020, but only by generating 200% of what it needs with half from renewables and exporting the excess. Well, they have a lot of wind up there.

An external PCIe bus is just a bad idea, like external PCI and ISA buses before it were. PC Card has mostly died now, thankfully. Firewire is pretty much dead on new machines too. Only Macs really seem to go in for Thunderbolt. People are catching on to how bad this sort of thing is for security.

I prefer flash memory chips that can be updated. If the manufacturer has to send everyone a new ROM chip, and for most of their customers also fit it for them for free, they are unlikely to fix any bugs they discover. With flash chips at least there is a chance they might patch any security holes.

He has valid points. Han unification has been a disaster and can't be easily fixed now, but it was done early on without enough consultation. It's all very well to suggest that someone should just submit a proposal, but that costs a lot of money and the ones that will really fix things tend to be rejected anyway.

It is a serious problem that some people can't write their names in Unicode, or that software using Unicode can't ever hope to handle even the top 10 most common languages in the world properly without a great deal of language specific hackery.

It holds back Unicode adoption and creates problems for people. Passport issuing services avoid Unicode because they can't enter people's names. Airlines avoid it for the same reason. But if the hotel booking system is Unicode... Well, you might not even get that far, because border security won't let you in as your name doesn't match a valid reservation anywhere.

It's got worse as companies got larger and the people at the top more separated from the people at the bottom. In a company of 30 people, the boss having to let five people go means speaking to them personally and experiencing the reaction of the other staff. In a company of 300,000 people an exec decided to get rid of 5,000 people in another town and delegates the job to a subordinate, never even meeting those people once.

It's enabled managers to avoid that unfortunate human trait of compassion, feeing them to make hard nosed business decisions where employees are just another resource. The reason Japanese companies last so long is that the managers, no matter how high up, feel personally responsible when they have to make people redundant, like it's a personal failure and something they should apologise for. In the west they feel the opposite - it's a triumph, money was saved and the business streamlined, and they deserve a fat bonus.

All true, but anything that forces manufacturers to clean up and stop polluting the air I am have to breathe is a good thing.

You don't need to learn 80,000 characters for Chinese. In China there are around 3,500 characters that most people need to know, and around 2,200 in Japan. However, most of them are related, made up of multiple simpler characters next to each other, so you don't need to memorize 3,500 unique symbols.

For example, many characters include the base character for "person". Once you know this base character and a few other base ones, you can pretty much guess the meaning of many of the more complex ones just by looking at how they are made up. They also provide a built-in hint system for memorizing the complex ones.

Using symbols this way has many advantages, one of the biggest being the speed at which text can be read and scanned. Westerners often seem to think that Chinese and Japanese web sites are just huge disorganized walls of text, like something like the 1990s, but actually they are very easy to scan for the part you want.

The proposal comes from a Google engineer who has done all the work figuring out what symbols are needed and what they should look like. Now the Unicode consortium only needs to consider it, and perhaps suggest a few changes.

As the proposal states, the major need here is to bridge the language barrier for important health information. It's actually a real pain for people with certain allergies to travel, because even if they memorize the characters for "peanuts" human beings find it hard to spot them in the dense text on the back of typical food packaging.

Uber only works when there are lots of drivers who used to have good jobs or who had family that had good jobs. That's because the $15/hr that Uber drivers max out at (if you account for gas & maintenance) isn't enough to buy a new car when the old one starts falling about at 200k miles. Maybe in a country w/o safety regulations, professional drivers insurance and emission standards Uber could work. But again, it all falls apart as soon as Uber stops externalizing it's costs onto either the driver, their family or society at large.

Uber isn't a solution. It's a symptom of a very diseased and dysfunctional system that'll eventually collapse in on itself.

it was a fascist dictatorship. It didn't even look a little like socialism, let alone communism. It was just a bunch of thugs looting and pillaging. I'm sorry you got caught up in all that, but you've never lived in a socialist society, any more than I (as an American) have lived in a Representational Democracy.

Our parents didn't have to settle for crappy little houses. Why do we have it worse than our parents did? Why are things getting worse, not better?

Now where do I start? 1. The "Luxuries" you speak of are pretty much Cell Phones, cable tv / Internet and eating out once a week. These are a drop in the bucket next to the cost of a car/house/college education. Get rid of all the luxuries you want, it won't make up for the 40 years of declining wages while productivity has more or less doubled.

2. I like this one: "learn a practical skill". Reminds me of a neighbor of mine who'd been to night school 3 times and each time seen her new career outsourced. What you really means is "Somehow develop a significantly higher IQ as if by magic so you can get the STEM degree that you couldn't get when you were 18".

3. The working class doesn't get to pick where they live. It's expensive as hell to up and move. You live where you're born and hope for the best. If people could just move somewhere that's better there'd be no 3rd world countries.

4. See Point # 1.

5. See this. Specifically the chorus ("Turning 30, 40, 50 gotta move in with my Parents...").

Fuck the American Dream. It's a bill of goods we've all been sold.