"Smartphones are for work, for life. They're not toys, they're tools."

Eh, if that were strictly the case, the market would be a lot different. Smartphones are a lot of things: tool, toy, fashion, entertainment.

Well the DRM isn't actually a useful feature, but having a player that supports BD-J, when BD-J is used for some kinds of DRM, is useful insofar as it lets you view the DRM'd discs.

If the question is whether BD-J being part of Blu Ray has added any useful features to Blu Ray, then I think the answer is no.

American engineering tends to use US-customary units. Scientific research mostly uses metric, but engineering uses mostly US-customary, somewhat varying by field (e.g. medical devices tend to use metric).

Interestingly it's so ingrained into a lot of aspects of North American production that even Canada, which has switched to using metric for engineering, has a lot of parts specified in a way that obviously refers to customary units, with things strangely coming in multiples of 25.4mm, 0.454kg, and the like.

Ah good point on (B). Also, since the Japanese public has gotten very skeptical of nuclear power post-Fukushima, that's likely to just put more upward pressure on electricity prices.

My impression is that, 10 or 15 years ago, electric vehicles and fuel-cell vehicles were perhaps equally good candidates for "future non-petroleum car technology", but that electric vehicles have been developing much faster, while fuel-cell vehicles have been going nowhere. Why now place a large bet on fuel cells?

I wonder if just putting a wage floor would help out with some of those abuses. Say, you can use H1B, but only for salary offers above $100k. That way H1B can be used to fill high-skill jobs with shortages, but not lower- and middle-end jobs.

If tech companies weren't shit at training they would be somewhat more fungible, though not perfectly so. Engineering companies are somewhat better at this: if a company is looking for chemical engineers and can't find someone with experience in exactly the process they're hiring for, they'll hire a chemical engineer with experience in a different process and get them up to speed. Tech companies seem incapable of doing that, and instead they have a big list of really specific background they want, "must have 7 years of experience in J2EE and 3 years experience using Joe Bob's Serialization Framework", then complain they can't find anyone so it must be a "programmer shortage".

It's not clear yet how the the layoffs will be distributed, but they certainly won't be all in Finland. Microsoft's already given notice of 1351 layoffs in Redmond, and that's likely only the first round of Redmond layoffs.

They did, though? Or at least the article currently says that. Here is what Wikipedia says at the moment:

Court cases

In 1982, Barry was convicted of extortion from and conspiracy against John Royden McConnell, and served 10 months of a 6-year prison term.[4][23]

In a 1982 civil case, a separate court ruled that Barry had extorted money from McConnell in record company dealings, requiring a financial award of C$285,000.[10] In 1987 he declared bankruptcy, voiding the award.[24][1] Barry said in an October 2013 Larry King interview that he had been a cocaine-addicted, twenty-something rocker at the time and credited the extortion conviction for changing his personal life.[25]

In 1998, Barry was indicted on corruption charges related to a VitaPro contract worth US$34 million with the Texas prisons.[26][27] In 1999, the Texas Supreme Court ruled the VitaPro contract with the Texas prisons was invalid.[28] After a trial in 2001, he was initially declared guilty, but the verdict was thrown out by U.S district court judge and a new trial was ordered in 2007.[26] He was then acquitted in 2008 after a bench retrial.[26] Barry said the charges were politically motivated.[24][27]

At this point they'd probably end up with fewer problems just by keeping it quiet forever.

How come your neighbor New Zealand can do better?

When it comes to Tone Abbott it's hard to limit yourself to just one or two examples of stupidity, but one of the more impressive fuckups was that he's so rabidly supportive of Sri Lanka's questionable government, that even the UK and USA are getting annoyed.

Yes, because of past car bombings, it's much harder to park a van in front of somewhere sensitive for even a few minutes. There is definitely a "demand", so to speak, for a remote-control van that wouldn't have to park.

There's a whole slew of ex-TW companies that kept various parts of the name. It's kind of a mess, possibly deliberately.

As another example: the entertainment production company, Warner Bros., which produced both films and music, was acquired by Time Warner. Fast-forward some decades, and there are now two companies named Warner, one of which is part of TW and one of which isn't. The film part is still known as Warner Bros and is still owned by Time Warner. The music part, formerly known as Warner Bros Music, was renamed to Warner Music, and then recently (2011) sold off to some holding company, so despite still being branded as the Warner music arm, it's no longer owned by Time Warner, or related to the film part of Warner.

Is Time Warner's ISP a different business than Time Warner's content company or something?

Yeah, Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable in 2009 as a separate company.