"hates on Obama" isn't the same as someone who "hates Obama"

Neah, the slang "hate on" (according to your own link) still has the same meaning: "To ridicule, insult, or act hatefully [emphasis mine] toward," — as the regular "hate". That otherwise well-written and spoken people would denigrate their speech to slang is just what I was referring to. I'm glad, it passed...

"He hit the girl" and "He hit on the girl"

Well, here the word "hit" has a completely different and unrelated meaning. A "hit" of something (like cocaine) is yet another unrelated meaning. That's not like "hate (on)" at all...

Case sensitivity is a good idea. The problem is that trying to do "case insensitive" matching depends on the locale. If you send your files to someone else, whether or not they are the "same" depends on your locale if you're serious. For Turkish users, 'i' and dotted 'I' are the same if you're considering them as case-sensitive; for many other languages and users, the dots create DIFFERENT characters. And if you're trying to make this "easy" it doesn't go far enough; Latin "a" usually looks the same as Cyrillic "". So please don't say "users can't tell the difference" - they ALREADY can't tell the difference visually, and naive solutions do not begin to address it. At least you can visually see the difference betweeen "Picture" and "picture", and in any case, users typically just click on the item and move on.

I think it would be a GOOD idea to require that Unix-like filenames be legal UTF-8 sequences (since you then know how to display them), and then reject filenames that are not UTF-8. But that's much less intrusive than filename mangling.

That said, it's too late to fix Windows, so if you're going to run on Windows you have to deal with the problem as it is.

Good luck finding devices that get dim enough, though; manufacturers have focused on making screens brighter for daytime use at the expense of nighttime usability.

About the only devices I have that dim enough to tolerably use in a dark room are my Retina MBP and iPad, and even then I must use f.lux or light-on-dark color schemes to make it comfortable. I've tried screen filtering apps for Android, but they never seem to dim the soft keys and can cause unexpected battery drain.

Oh, and don't get me started on backlit keyboards.

Don't be fooled by the cartoonish, strong worded presentation -- this is 100% true. I went through it myself and the way to solve it is exactly that diet plus probiotics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [BTW, one I am Bulgarian and very well know the difference between yogurt in the supermarket and the real deal and two, I live in Amsterdam whose mayor said refined sugar is a class A drug in his opinion]

also this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Just to mention that in my case I was advised to go to the diet by "real doctor" [not a "loony"] after being diagnosed with systemic stomach candidosis. Just one of the side-effects is that I got the physique I had when I was 17....and they say obesity is an issue number 1, well there is your solution...

Just get f.lux.

Yeah, what's next? Case-insensitive email addresses and domain names?

Remember, the whole reason files have names and not sequences of random hex is for human legibility. For most applications, case sensitivity does not increase legibility.

I'm afraid you can't blame or give credit to Obama for that

BS. Of course, I can blame Obama — he could have and should have gotten Iraqi government to agree for us to stay there longer — based on the new developments.

Then, of course, if you are killing suspected terrorists instead of capturing and interrogating them (so that, heaven forbid, no new prisoners appear in Guantanamo), you might not even be aware of those new developments until you see some decapitations on YouTube. Either way, the affirmative action wonder is as sorry excuse of a president, as Carter was before him...

Nothing like a reminder that you live in the future.

I know we've been talking about biomechatronics for decades, but Moore's Law and developments in nanomaterials are making things possible that were the stuff of science fiction just a few years ago. Simply put, we're starting to build amazingly large numbers of amazingly complex structures at amazingly small scales out of amazing materials, amazingly cheap.

Mind you, that's not new either; biology has been doing that for eons. Yet being able to manufacture it, to mass-produce biological or biocompatible materials like BCIs and prosthetic organs, is a remarkable and wholly new development. I fully expect the next half century will see a medical revolution that rivals the computer revolution of the last.

More than at any time since the Cold War, scientists are tinkering with viruses to make them more deadly and more able to spread

Citation needed.

That Sony Picture Entertainment — like most of Hollywood — are Illiberal-dominated is well-known.

That their systems were so easily and so thoroughly penetrated hints, that the company is mismanaged.

The revealed conversations confirm it. The particular item — which dwells on NYT's Maureen Down (herself an Illiberal icon) as willing to abolish fundamental journalist principles "for the Greater Good" — cites the following conversation-snippet:

• Pascal emailed Dowd, saying “I THOUGHT THE STORY WAS GREAT I HOPE YOUR HAPPY"
• Dowd responded: “I hope you’re happy! Thanks for helping. Let’s do another.”
• Pascal replied, “Your my favorite person so yes”
• Dowd finished the conversation with “you’re mine! you’re amazing”

After Obama was elected, when dissent stopped being patriotic, and the only possible reason underlying any sort of disapproval of government was racism, the "haters" were often accused of "hating on Obama". That use of "on" was hardly proper English, and I for one was wondering, if Illiberals are genuinely Illiterate, or are deliberately ruining their speech — perhaps, to better commiserate with the downtrodden. Fortunately, the "on" slowly disappeared and my question went away...

Ms. Pascal's repeated use of "your" instead of "you're" — even after being gently corrected by her wordsmith correspondent — makes me wonder again. Her use of ALL CAPS identifies her as a moron rather firmly in my book — any sort of stupid Sony does, while she remains at the helm, will not surprise me one bit.

wrote that 22 states permit direct sales of automobiles by Tesla to retail buyers, and of those the majority--14 of them-- voted for President Obama

There is a much fresher data-point for the political leanings of those states — we had elections a month ago. That this non-biased and bi-partisan article — the kind we've come to expect from the Newspaper of Record — chose to use the two year old data instead to illustrate its point, means, the point probably is not supported by the more recent poll...

He suggested that Democratic California, Illinois, and New York "have freer markets in auto retailing than Texas," which is presently Republican.

Is it "freer markets" for everyone, or just for the "green" technology — which got a major government loan (on very sweet terms) to survive and ought to be helped to avoid embarrassing the Democratic administration? Would those Democratic bastions of free markets be as supporting of freedom, if it were about sale of, say, high-capacity toilets?

If you really care for free markets, you'll vote Libertarian — with anybody else you still need a bloody permit to do (or sell) almost anything. Splitting hairs about who is more likely to permit this vs. that is stupid — you have your right to pursue happiness. Selling cars the way you want certainly ought to be covered by that.

Is the small bit of evidence enough to make a case?

No, it is not. To show, which party supports freer markets, one would need to study the market-freedom across different goods and services. Cherry-picking one item, that is so dear to one party's heart, in an industry, that is heavily-regulated by all states (as well as Federal government) is meaningless and reveals nothing but bare partisanship.

You can still buy a game in one location and play it in another, you just can't gift it to someone else's account in another region.

I'm okay with that; despite what some people here will argue (free market blah blah) I'd sooner see purchase restrictions like this than expect people in poor countries to pay a week's wages for a game or movie or album.

As long as they don't start making content only available in certain regions, they're making the best of a bad situation.