but it didn't spread because the people involved died quickly (not necessarily due to HIV, but due to the brutal nature of life in those places and times),

For this to be true, for millions of years, people infected with the chimp virus did not have sex with females and did not live in a village type community where they could spread the disease. Instead, they lived a harsh, secluded life, devoid of human contact before dying. Is that true?

HIV is a mutated version of a chimpanzee virus, ... which probably made the species-jump through contact with infected blood while handling bush meat.

Okay, was there no monkey meat business before 1920s? Why did it make the jump only at that time? How exactly does a virus change from a chimp version to a human version?

To add to my previous reply, copyright laws have benefited publishers tremendously. The author, who spent decades of his/her life mastering the art of writing, only got paid for 70ish years (with a pittance royalty rate of 5 to 12%). Meanwhile, publishers and retailers have profited tremendously by simply printing and distributing those books for hundreds of years, and still do.

If you prefer books in paper form, you either have to borrow from a library or pay the publisher and retailer. But you can also download the book, for free, from many websites, so that has probably reduced publisher profits.

But are you really able to get those books for free?

Yep, I just download them from Project Gutenberg. I wonder what year they get to host free movies?

You get 80% of the performance of a $570 i7 if you buy a $125 i3. For $250 you could get a dual processor i3 that was faster than an i7

True, but Intel and AMD are creating artificial constraints that prevent you from running dual i3 cpus on a system. Today, to run a two-processor setup, you have buy an expensive workstation motherboard, expensive ECC DRAM, and lastly very expensive Xeon class CPUs that support multi processing. Such a system would easily exceed 2-3 times the price of a desktop i7 system.

The days where "hand-coded assembly" was actually faster than optimized C/C++ are long gone. Modern CPU pipelining and out-of-order execution simply isn't something you can optimize for in your head any more.

Plus, don't forget that most of the Windows kernel was written back in the day when every instruction cycle mattered, and MS took that very seriously (and they certainly hired top talent in the Gates days).

Win95 had a lot of asm stuff, but NT (and 2k and xp) did not have much asm clever code because it contained mostly portable C. When NT was released, it was more stable and architecturally better than win95. But win95 was faster on the then current hardware because it had a lot more asm code than NT. When the hardware got faster, NT's slowness became less apparent.

Hand-coded assembly will always beat compiled code, but it costs 10-20x to create and maintain that stuff. That's why OSes are written in C (and also the fact that C is portable among multiple processors). Even in modern OSes like windows 10, linux or freebsd, you'll find many performance critical routines written in asm.

WHAT, SPECIFICALLY was added?

Who knows? But with each progressive version of iOS, os x or windows, the time taken to complete the same task INCREASES for unknown reasons (except to make hardware and software vendors more money). Note that the task has not been visibly improved or changed, but somehow its performance is a lot lower on older hardware.

If windows were to be rewritten in hand-coded assembly, and all fluff features were removed, who knows, the overall system performance might increase 3x.

3. Much shorter copyright durations, probably varying by industry/type of work and dictated by what creates a reasonable commercial incentive but not an excessive one in each context, which I suspect would be around 5-10 years in most cases.

Lulz, if that's the case then I and many other people are simply going to wait for the copyrights to expire and get the books, music and movies for free. The quality of art is steadily deteriorating anyway. So 10-year old art is very likely better than anything modern and we get that for free. Please tell your lawmarkes to change the laws.

the next giant leap in ubiquitous mass surveillance.

And to add insult to injury, we are supposed to pay the people spying on us by buying their products.

...copied from java.

How about we create a metric friendly unit for human measurement called fut.
1 fut = 30 cm
1 fut = 10 dinches
1 dinch = 3 cm

So, instead of a height of imperial 5"8' or a non-intuitive 172cm, we get a more intuitive 5.7 futs.

When Australia converted to metric, the building industry very intelligently decided that mm is to be used exclusively and cm are not allowed.

So, the specs would say the height of a 5-story building is 18,000 mm instead of 180m ?

Can't they simply hire some thai cuisine experts to taste and certify that a restaurant is up to standards (something like "XYZ restaurant is certified by the govt. of thailand taste testers") instead of building a (pie-in-the-sky) machine? Other countries could should probably do the same.

Exactly, so if we changed the school curriculum to teach business courses (including sales and marketing) at an early age, there would be competition to companies like microsoft. This would lead to more businesses being created. With more businesses around, there would be intense competition for qualified or even average workers and employee wages would have to rise.

Right now, business is taught at a very late age to students -- near or above the age of 20 and is often prohibitively expensive. In other words, most people are taught to be employees. People with an aptitude for business should be taught early in the same way math is taught at an early age.

And you keep that low-level control by calling objc from Swift on rare occasions. But for normal apps, objc is quite tedious. Why do you think Apple invented Swift if objc was already good enough? Hint: it wasn't.