Retaliation? This would essentially declare a new er of corporate v corporate cyber warfare with no holds barred and a referee paid by the highest bidder.

Taking and transcribing voicemail? My last 3 phones, all Android and going back at least four years, have had this feature. Is Apple really that far behind, that this feature comes out as News, and what's more, implies that they invented it?

Christ, does anyone editing this site actually keep up with technology?

What's wrong with farmed algae?

It's not people.

No they don't, because they are pictograms with very specific visual appearances. Such things don't belong in a character set, because things in a character set are characters. Glyphs (visual presentation of characters) live in fonts and each font designer is free to represent them differently, as long as they're recognisable. If every font has to represent things in the same way, then they don't belong in a character set, they belong in a set of standard images.

The other issue with this kind of cruft is collation. The unicode collation algorithm is insanely complex (and often a bottleneck for databases that need to keep strings sorted). Different locales sort things in different orders and most have well-defined rules for things that are characters. The rules for how you sort a dog-poop emoji relative to a GHS hazard pictogram, relative to a roman letter are... what?

Being a character implies a bunch of other stuff such as different graphical representations (fonts) for the same semantic symbol and a collation ordering. This doesn't make sense for a load of stuff that's now in unicode. If these are meant to be glyphs with well-defined visual representations, then they don't belong in a font with their representation dependent on the font designer's whim. If they're not characters used in any language, then what are the collation rules for them? What order do dog-poop and contains-gluten sort, and how does this vary between locales?

I'm not totally convinced by this. The poorer you are, the less likely you are to own your own house. That makes moving a lot cheaper (selling a house is expensive, changing rented accommodation is inconvenient but not nearly as expensive).

It's easy to retreat to a True Scotsman argument, but when it comes to political and economic systems there are very few examples of any ideology being completely applied. Not capitalism, not communism, not socialism. Most countries have a blend of several parts of different ideas. Claiming that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a shining example of socialism is about as accurate as claiming that the Democratic Republic of Congo is a shining example of a democratic republic. They may have the word in their name, but that's about it. Even the USA makes more use of Marxist ideas than the USSR did for most of its existence.

It varies a bit depending on the relative scarcity of your skills and jobs. For someone with skills in shortage, job security isn't that great a thing, as moving jobs will typically involve a pay rise. For someone with fewer options, it's much more important because there's going to be a gap between jobs and they're not in a position to negotiate a better package. Unions were supposed to redress some of this imbalance: an individual employee may be easily replaceable for a lot of companies, but the entire workforce (or even a third of the workforce) probably isn't.

Unfortunately, unions in the USA managed to becomes completely self-interested and corrupt institutions. This is partly due to lack of competition: in most of the rest of the world you have a choice of at least a couple of unions to join, so if your union isn't representing your interests you can switch to another one. Partly due to the ties between unions and organised crime in the USA coming out of the prohibition era. Partly due to the demonisation of anything vaguely socialist during the Cold War, which reduced employee involvement in unions (and if most people aren't involved in the union, then the few that are have disproportionate influence).

Even this has been somewhat eroded by automation. If you're replacing 1,000 employees with robots and 100 workers, then a union's threat to have 600 people go on strike doesn't mean much and even when it does it's very hard to persuade those 600 that striking won't mean that they're moved to the top of the to-be-redundant list.

But, back to my original point: lack of jobs for life isn't the real problem. A large imbalance in negotiating power between companies and employees is. When employees are in a stronger negotiating position, companies will favour keeping existing employees because it's cheaper than hiring new ones.

What's the minimum altitude requirement for flying a non-military aircraft over a residential area in the USA?

If we all went vegetarian and killed off the domesticated cattle, then we'd make a huge difference! Kill a cow today!

I found that above about 10Mb/s you start to hit diminishing returns. The jump from 10 to 30 was barely noticeable. The jump from 30 to 100 is noticeable with large downloads, but nothing else. From 100 to 1000, the main thing that you notice is if you accidentally download a large file to a spinning-rust disk and see how quickly your fill up your RAM with buffer cache...

Over the last 10 years, I've gone from buying the fastest connection my ISP offered to buying the slowest. The jump from 512Kb/s to 1Mb/s was really amazing (though not as good as moving to 512Kb/s from a modem that rarely managed even 33Kb/s), but each subsequent upgrade has been less exciting.