That works well for 1-2 billion people and not so well for the remaining 5-6 billion. While we're working on that universal language, a few universal "hieroglyphics" are useful and there's no law against writing elevator next to the elevator sign. Like say these, these, these or these.

That said, allergens may be useful for store products but that's usually half the markings on a restaurant menu which typically can be stuff like vegetarian, vegan, hot, garlic and so on. And for many complete dishes many will contain lots of allergens, it's probably easier to use a negative marking like these. I don't quite see what existing use case these symbols are supposed to cover, yes it could be added to the ingredients list but you need to solve other issues like how do you prominently say no allergens and not unmarked?

I don't think it's just the companies that have changed though, it's the market the companies live in. Before there were plenty of fairly sheltered waters, where you were competing with the shop down the street but it was obvious the town needed a shop like yours. Weathering the bad times was possibly more a game of attrition than truly caring for the workers. Today it's all about globalization and open markets with huge waves like on the open ocean.

Jobs are washed away and probably never coming back, the large multinationals that have caught the huge global waves make tons of money while the small local or regional businesses get crushed. I don't think they have a choice anymore, really. That is to say, I think companies that tried this "cradle to grave" approach to employment would be crushed by the markets. And the ones who are big enough to have a choice, well they're stockholder driven and don't have any particular allegiance to anyone so they'll just squeeze out all the profit they can.

On the bright side, they can't really carry on this race to the bottom without actually pulling people out of the gutter. China and India has seen wages and living standards increase considerably, as they chase new cheap labor that in itself becomes a scarce resource to be competed for. That will cut into the profitability of outsourcing, of course balanced by your pay not being worth as much abroad. Because they make decent money now too.

How doesn't it work? When you press the Win button (or click Start) and then start typing in Win10, what you get is exactly that - a search. And, indeed, I've just tried it, and typing in "vi" brings up VS 2015 as the very first entry, and pressing Enter will launch it.

You are connecting a very, very remote area of Russia with a very, very remote area of the US. Take a look at a population density map, there's no cities whatsoever nearby. And long distance shipping will either go by sea (cheaper) or plane (faster), just the maintenance on thousands of miles of rail would kill it. This is as likely as the head of NASA suggesting a manned mission to Mars, it's his idea to make lofty ideas but the people with the money will never fund it.

And when Windows 7 is no longer getting security updates? What then?

Might as well slowly start looking into other options.

I was a MS Windows fan since win386 days. I chose Ubuntu in 2005. When Ubuntu messed up their desktop UI, I switched to Linux Mint (and OS X on a Apple laptop).

Maybe staying with one desktop OS for your entire life limits you a bit?

P.S. So much easier to be on non-Microsoft OSs now than it was a decade ago. So many things are either web-based or cross-platform. I haven't used wine or virtualbox in well over a year.

I think my point is ultimately this: if you're seriously afraid that people will vote for a far-right party in sufficient numbers that they will end up exercising considerable power, to the extent that proportional representation (i.e. accurate expression of those people's will) is undesirable, then the society itself is badly broken for whatever reason. You can postpone the inevitable trainwreck for a while by suppressing that vote or rendering it useless, but ultimately you'll lose that game anyway, except that all that anger will get released over a much shorter period of time.

I don't have an answer as to what to do with such a society, though. Especially when you're on the inside.

I'm not the OP, and I wasn't saying that Stasi literally had "truckloads of harddisks". Just that you're probably just as wrong in assuming that they had none or so little that it's not worth mentioning, as he is in assuming that they had most of their data on them.

The article submitter is asking about his specific problem. If he's an "average Joe", he's on the wrong website.

Such as?

Did you even read the articles that you've linked to? They talk about privacy issues with default settings (that is, "Express" install). If you're a regular member of the Slashdot audience, you will certainly pick "Customize" during installation anyway, and you'll get individual switches for all these things combined on the very first screen that you'll see after that, from advertising ID to Cortana. Just disable it all, and you're good to go. For bonus points, use a local user account rather than Microsoft ID.

Not necessarily. Parties like these thrive on populist rhetoric, and when they actually get power (even if it's local and limited in nature) and can't really deliver, their support plummets quickly. The only case where it doesn't work is when mainstream parties are even more demonstrably incompetent, but then the real problem is there.

Can you clarify "here"?

I have to ask: which basic rights does the distribution (as opposed to creation) of child porn impinge, that a snuff video, or, say, a video of an ISIS burning a man alive, does not?

If citizens of countries other than France pass laws that deal with this problem, then all is well and good - and you should be working to convince them to do so.

Why should other countries, the citizens of which have decided that free speech is more important, be affected by that, though?