It's great they're adding new currency symbols for new currencies, but there's still a long-standing issue of the $ with one bar and $ with two bars. It's currently still considered a stylistic difference, but the scope of Unicode has evolved to account for every glyph known to man. Certainly, one- and two-bar $ can hardly be said to be the same glyph within this new context.

Especially considering that there are already stylistic duplicates (half-width and full-width latin forms vs. plain latin), I can't seem to understand the justification behind letting one- and two-bar $, which are historically separate glyphs, be underrepresented.

If only they could restore those lost emails from the Bush era while they're at it.

I'm not trying to be partisan; e-mails are constantly being "lost" in any controversy irrespective of political affiliation, and I think the NSA should do their patriotic duty and help recover these important bits of evidence for congress like they otherwise normally do for the FBI.

While I mostly agree with you, there is a market that P.F. Changs is filling that many local places cannot. Unless you're living in an area that has a good sized Chinese population, most "real" chinese food places serve items like fried chicken and egg drop soup. The rest of the menu is probably going to suck just as bad or worse.

High end Chinese restaurants is hard to do, mostly because the majority of Americans (to no fault of their own) have long since associated Chinese food with cheap, and the "high end" Chinese food in the U.S. just doesn't cut it quality-wise for the local Chinese population (especially compared to what's found in Hong Kong or even Vancouver or Toronto) for that price. My point being, there really aren't many places that can support a decent local Chinese restaurant. But where they are present, they're certainly preferable food-wise to P.F. Changs.

As for why Chinese people haven't started a chain like P.F. Changs already (that serves more authentic Chinese food, say), well, that's largely a cultural thing that would require several books to explain. The closest thing to that is Panda Express, and we all know what types of food they serve.

I've had pressed CDs that began developing holes in the reflective layer starting from the outside edge. Those defects are irrecoverable.

Scratched CDs and DVDs are not as big of a deal these days as they used to be. Really good drives can handle them without losing or corrupting data, though the drive would slow down over the scratched areas, so if the disc was bad, the read speeds would drop to almost nothing. There used to be a really good site that did incredibly detailed reviews of optical drives, including taking black sharpies to media. Not sure if it's around anymore.

But honestly, who uses optical media anymore? Especially after the HD-DVD/Blu-ray debacle, I think everyone's turned off by optical media and prefers streaming now.

It's amusing you're putting the blame for imperfection on the known imperfect nature of physical systems.

I'd prefer to blame management of the software product for not pushing for more reliable software, which is by nature supposed to be perfect. Note that in some cases, management and lead developers are basically the same people, but in Apple's case, I'm certain they can afford to hire real managers to make these kinds of important decisions.

Or every few months due to unhandled edge cases.

Writing reliable code is hard. Writing reliable code for generic uses is even harder. Filesystems are at the farthest end of both spectrums: it needs to be most generic and most reliable at the same time.

To avoid lawsuits, big companies will probably still want a contract signed before using the patented technology on purpose. The smaller players won't be able to ask for something signed, but they also will be less likely to worry about lawsuits, and they are sufficiently covered by Musk's public official blog post.

No good deed will go unpunished though. Saying "no strings attached" is practically asking for people to look for the strings, and then make imaginary ones up when they can't be found.

How many people even think of shifting to something other than P, R, and D? How many people know how to transmission brake? I suspect they are the same number.

The solution to a good number of car accidents is better drivers, which means stricter and more comprehensive drivers license tests. The auto industry would oppose such a thing because that would also mean fewer drivers, which I think would actually be a very good thing in the long run.

Somehow, I'm not sure priesthood would be the alternate profession of choice for out-of-work scientists.

In the biomedical research field, everybody fabricates results. Or selects them. Or fails to do the research properly and contaminates the experiment. That's why so few experiments are easily reproduced, and a good chunk of published literature eventually gets refuted, or at the very least, refined. The only thing is that scientists don't attempt to reproduce most experiments. So nobody really knows for sure what's real and what's not.

There's pressure to publish, but there's also pressure to selectively publish positive results. No journal will publish experimental dead-ends, so nobody writes papers saying their experiment failed. And so people who spend years of their life working on an experiment will force their paper through by forcing a positive result from the data if it doesn't go the way they intend.

Things are only really called out when there's a lot of money involved in the results of an experiment, and there's pressure from private industry to monetize, stem cells in this case, clones in the other. Otherwise, things languish for 30 or more years before somebody takes a good, long hard look at the data. Sometimes, it's because the original researcher has to die first before the revocation is even allowed to happen.

Look at that fish oil B.S. recently. It was known fact for 30+ years that fish oil, specifically omega 3 fatty acid was beneficial for the cardiovascular system. Turns out somebody fabricated it, and nobody caught on for the next 30 years.

Or Dolly, the cloned sheep who turned out not to be a real clone. Or any early literature on vitamins supplements, whose effects are largely found to have been literally pissed away. Or the ever-changing food pyramid and other nutritional recommendations.

And I don't even have to mention all of the monetary incentive-based skewed research.

Pure research, that which deals in either the microcosm or the macrocosm exclusively, is not subjected to this fault. The former tends to not have such ambiguities, and the former is taken as ambiguous by nature. But beware reseach that tries to tie the two worlds together (for example, asserting that a protein deficiency is correlated to a certain disease, or tying cell phones to medical disorders) and presents some solid, concrete result. Both socially and academically, we're still unable to support that kind of research the way it should be supported. And so it's really a crapshoot which paper ends up withstanding the test of time and which one doesn't.

Even a global search and replace probably wouldn't be a problem unless it's a multi-line, lazy regex, as I believe hard drives went up to 20MB. And at that point, I'd expect the CPU to DIAF long before hitting the 640K memory limit.

Considering the lack of inconsistencies throughout the text, I would hardly expect there to be any major issues with GRRM's expanded memory.

*ducks*

Solution: Don't use IE and Chrome. And maybe even the latest version of Firefox, but I wouldn't know.

Actually, he only spends four years on the writing. It takes five years total because his daisy wheel printer can only print two pages a day.

The best part about Minecraft's success is that in this period of neverending one-upmanship of glitz and glam in video games, Notch delivers a great game on practically gameplay alone.

Of course, there are plenty of other indie successes out there (Torchlight I/II), but Minecraft's target demographics is archetypal for gamers while it is the third most successful game in the world (the top two target a wider range of demographics).