For a 200 million dollar developement that's a terrible ROI. 0.7% and that is before expenses. A more reasonable 5% per annum yeild (before expenses) woudl require charging $3720 per month.

Is a $3720 per month rental considered "affordable" in that area?

You can't undo prison time already served but assuming the screwup comes to light before the person dies you can at least release them to live out the rest of the life as a free person. You could also compensate them financially though I don't know if any country actually does that.

Afaict the main reason the USA still has the death penalty is to bully people into plea bargins for life imprisonment (and no I don't think this is a good thing, I think the whole plea bargin system is abhorrent).

The summary is that they are introducing a new http header, this can be used to tell the browser to automatically use https instead of http to request resources used by the page. Thus avoiding "mixed content" warnings without requiring the website operator to go through the whole page (and potentially things like stylesheets referenced by the page) changing urls to https.

Be aware that some vendors list a product on thier web site as if it were a current production product when really it's at the "we have a few samples and will let you have one if we like you and/or you pay us a load of money" stage.

The rockets were basically empty at the time of landing. I would think a booster full of fumes would give something similar to a "hollywood explosion". Big fireball but relatively little bang.

If paypal could have shut down paypalsucks.com by "lawyering the shit out of them" don't you think they would have done so by now. I don't see why paypal.sucks would be any different.

The point is with expensive domains many people will chose not to buy a domain, they will then end up using their hosting providers domain and therefore locked in. I do not see being locked in as a good thing.

OTOH I think allowing people to have freedom to move hosting provider for their email and for their personal/hobby site without changing address on each move or more than doubling the cost was a very good thing.

UTF-8 is a highly elegant and simple format. I'm certainly not aware of anything anyone has done to make it "extra complicated".

Now unicode itself is massively complicated but afaict that is mostly a reflection of the fact that some human languages refuse to fit nicely into the model of "a sequence of characters placed next to each other from left to right".

One thing that MS does for some buyers (this is certainly true for universities, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't true for other large organisations)is give them deeply discounted subscription licenses where the pricing model for those deeply discounted licenses is not based on the number of installations but on some measure of the size of the organisation as a whole.

From the point of view of the customer this initially looks like a great deal. As well as saving money on the licenses themselves they are freed from the need to track installations saving lots of money in license management and auditing. It's subscription based so they pay at a constant rate rather than bursts whenever a new version comes out making budgets easy to manage.

However once the customer is in such an arrangement they lose most of the incentive to reduce the use of the software or use cheaper/free alternatives. They would have to massively reduce their use of the software in question before buying and auditing individual licenses would be cheaper than the subscription. During the transition period of said massive reduciont they would be paying for internal auditing and accounting that would not deliver any benefit or serve any external purpose until the process was complete.

IMO File formats are not the real problem. Microsoft's binary word processor and spreadsheet formats were reverse engineered years ago and have been pretty stable since 2000. OOXML is XML based and even has some documentation available on how to read it.

The real problem is that office documents blur the line between input and output and this makes them fundamentally fragile. An office document is input to a layout (in the case of a word processor) or calculation (in the case of a spreadsheet) engine but the user always looks at the output of that engine. Especially with word processors since the user is always looking at the output they aren't thinking about the structure of the input, they just bash things arround (holding down the space bar or enter key for example or dragging boxes around with no idea if their position is text-relative or page-relative)

So I don't think this will solve anything, even if MS implements ODF and even if the UK government gets it's employees to start using it as their main format for storing files (good luck) I would expect loading a document from office into libreoffice to still have similar results to today. The input (text typed, pictures included, user-specified values in spreadsheet cells) will probablly carry across fine but in some cases it will result in noticably different output (different and possiblly unreadable layout for word processed documents, different rounding of results for spreadsheets). Especially for large badly structure docuements.

Even discounting the spoofing possibilities your proposal would mean that anyone who uses baidu from outside china will find themselves cut off from github. I expect that isn't what github wants.

The whole internet standards process works based on "asking nicely". You can tell people they shouldn't use an option or even that by using that option they will be non-compliant with the latest version of the standard but you can't really stop them from using it if they decide that compatibility with old clients outweighs security.

dunno whereabout in europe you live but here in the UK it's still fairly common to see traditional doors/frames with only a single point lock and with the door hung so it opens inwards. A well-aimed kick, a handheld battering ram or a correctly placed crowbar will more than likely break the lock from the frame on such a door.

Putting everything internal on one network is the lazy option. Seggregating stuff onto VLANS is extra work and cost and is only generally done by places large enough to have an IT department.