I have little trouble entering Hanzi with a standard keyboard, and your typical Chinese person has even less.

You might recall that Chinese consists of a large number of related but mutually unintelligible "dialects". A Beijinger visiting Hong Kong might pronounce it "Jiulong", but he can still read the sign that tells him he's arrived in "Nine Dragons"--or, as the locals pronounce it--Kowloon.

For that matter, handwriting recognition works quite well these days. Very handy when you're out and about and you see a character you don't know--just trace it on the screen of your smartphone with your finger, and up it pops in your dictionary, with the meaning and pronunciation. (NB: You *must* know the stroke order rules for writing Chinese characters for this to work. You don't have to write the character especially neatly, but the strokes need to have the correct order and placement.)

I'm not saying I *prefer* an ideographic writing system, just that what you're alluding to is already (AFAICT) a solved problem.

I'm glad someone else noticed that. Not that it applies to me, since I've already learnt how to say "I can't eat crustaceans--I'm allergic" in about 12 languages.

Interesting read. Thanks for the link.

Apparently Redundant is the new "I'm a chicken-shit with a chip on my shoulder and no good response" mod of choice.

And how long does it take two trucks to ship the same amount of goods as a fully loaded freighter?

I'm not sure how that's relevant unless your company needs to ship a full freighter-load of goods. I'm not talking about the biggest companies here. I'm talking about the myriad companies that routinely use international shipping in much lower volume. For those companies, what matters is latency—how long they must wait for something to arrive stateside—not bandwidth.

If you're one of those rare companies that can fill a freighter, then your company is clearly in the category that can afford to bring in its first two weeks' supply by air while the boats are carrying the next month's supply, and the boat latency doesn't matter (unless you're a shipping company). But even for those big companies, it could still cut out the second week of air shipments, which could be a significant financial win. And for shipping companies that provide services to smaller companies, being able to offer a level of service between "very expensive" and "glacial" would be a significant win, too.

Of course, I did forget to mention one other thing, which is the need to build roads to that bridge, which would no doubt add considerably to the total cost.

Nobody can predict what will happen between the U.S. and Russia, but I'd be really surprised if things got so bad that U.S. companies didn't feel comfortable shipping goods through Russia. It's not like we're talking about a third-world country or anything.

And what you say about damage is downright silly, because the same concern applies equally for a bridge inside our borders. In fact, by your standards, the docks where those boats load their cargo should never have been built, because if one of the minimum-wage immigrants carrying cargo on his shoulders out to a small boat in waist-deep water dies of a heart attack, it doesn't prevent other workers from loading cargo, whereas if a dock collapses, it does, and those workers can be used for other things if we suddenly no longer need boat shipping. I mean, the only way that logic even starts to make sense is if a serious failure is highly probable, and if that's the case, then it means they got the design wrong.

Besides, the cost of a Bering Strait bridge could be a lot lower than you might think. They would need one segment of it to be tall enough to let shipping traffic through—possibly between the two Diomede Islands—but the rest of it could ostensibly be a simple pontoon bridge, which is relatively cheap.

Most of the cost of the project would likely be for that one span between the two islands that's tall enough to let ships pass under it. That would cost several billion dollars, in all likelihood. The remaining 55 miles, assuming other pontoon bridges are any indication of cost, should be the neighborhood of $5 million to $10 million per lane-mile. At 55 miles long, a four-lane pontoon bridge should cost a couple of billion dollars, give or take, which is about as much money as we waste on a single B-2 bomber.

Of course, a pontoon bridge in that area would have to be specifically designed to withstand the rather severe storms that the Bering sea experiences, which could drive the cost way up. On the other hand, the project is so huge that economies of scale would kick in and bring the component cost way, way down (because you'd be building over 18,000 identical 16-foot segments), which would probably balance that out to a large extent.

Of course, I am not a bridge engineer, so my estimates could be way off, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone were able to come up with a design that fell under the $10 billion mark, or about twice the cost of the Bay Bridge. Heck, the tunnel that Russia proposed was only sixty or seventy billion, so that estimate probably isn't too far off the mark.

I'm not forgetting. Then again, that was also true for telnet back when I started setting up DNS zone transfers.... Just saying. :-)

But not cheaper and faster. A boat from China or Japan takes 10-14 plus loading and unloading time (which, if you're sharing a boat with a bunch of other companies, can potentially add weeks of delay before the boat leaves the dock), and air shipping is relatively expensive. With two or drivers trading off, you could potentially do California to Japan by truck in about a week.

Having a bridge between North America and Asia could be absolutely huge for shipping, as a potential midpoint between the two shipping methods. Whether it will be or not is another question.

I was thinking more of the evolution of the Web browser from document viewer to (in theory) cross-OS/cross-device application platform.

(50? I've wondered about that. I think my posting limit must vary with the phases of the moon or something--seems to change without rhyme or reason.)

I stayed on KDE3 for a long time, but 4 finally got to where I could stand to use it. I actually still prefer Konqueror as a FM, but Dolphin became "good enough" (for me, at least) around version 4.7 or so.

I have never liked Gnome very much, more recent versions even less.

I also still have a special place in my heart for Window Maker--it's simple and easy on resources, which is great for older hardware and laggy remote sessions. Also in part because I know one of the original developers.

Wasn't the Internet supposed to do this for us already?

Except that cows give milk from their *udders*. Otherwise, nice job.

It's nothing of the sort. It's more like some of the frogs noticed when someone turned on the stove eye under the cook-pot they were swimming in.

Seems to me he's describing the very model that Microsoft's been using in corporate settings for the last 20 or 30 years.

"Per-machine licensing" or "per-seat licensing" doesn't ring a bell...?