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.

Exactly and in most cases the exception says "openssl". Does a slightly patched version from a distro still count as "openssl"? Does a forked and renamed version with substantial changes still count as "openssl"?

AIUI people (and retailers) take them seriously enough that game developers typically choose an ESRB rating and then tailor the content of their game to hit it (this tailoring can happen in either direction). In particular they try very hard to avoid the AO rating as many retailers refuse to stock games that have it.
Which ESRB rating they try to hit depends on the audiance they have in mind.

There was a big blowup with GTA san andreas about a minigame that was disabled but not removed causing the ESRB to re-rate the game as AO with a subsequent replacement of most stock in the retail channel and a class-action lawsuit (though the number of members of the class who actually claimed anything was pretty small)

Theres also a thorny license issue, some projects released under the GPL make a exception for openssl and it's not always clear whether that would apply to forks of openssl.

Maybe

With ssh the original project had moved to a propietary license so linux distros that only accepted free software had to go with a fork or stick with a very outdated version. With openssl the original project is still alive. So the developers of linux distros will have to have a big argument over whether the reduced security exposure outweighs the reduced feature set.

because the larger an epidemic grows the more expensive it is to deal with and the greater the chance of an infected person escaping and starting an outbreak elsewhere. The ebola epidemic got big enough to suck badly for the three main countries involved and there were a few minor outbreaks in other countries but fortunately the outbreak was contained in time to avoid any signficant outbreaks in the rest of the world.