Wingdings is to fonts what VBA/Access is to application development, so I can't say I feel terribly sad about that.

Lords were seeking to extract the greatest possible profit from their serfs too, that is not new. Most all improvements to the life of the common man has been hard fought for at the expense of the rich and powerful. True, it has been quite successful at advancing science and technology but the world would not have stood still on curiosity, ingenuity and altruism either. And lately the trickle down effect that created the middle class has slowed considerably and the rich are again pulling away from the rest, where Marx saw machines and factories it's now software and data centers that generate billions while the jobs are outsourced to the cheapest corners of the earth.

Before they gimped it to match UTF-16 it had ~2^31 combinations, now it has ~2^16. And you could have extended UTF-8 to a full ~2^42 by just continuing the scheme to fill the entire first byte, so space is really of little concern. They probably just don't want to coordinate a million different people who want to add a smiley or their imaginary fantasy language to the standard.

Or simply the ambiguity of the language. If I can get water from my own well I'd probably say I have "free water" even if I once paid someone $300 to dig the well because the marginal cost of another bucket is zero. If there was one or several bids or I did it with $300 worth of my own labor, doesn't really matter. I don't really see a problem with Google saying a $300 one-time fee for "free Internet" service forever after. Certainly if you've already sunk the cost and is selling the house, then it's perfectly legitimate to promote it as free Internet service for the buyer.

You know, in reality we'd probably have a bit more than half a dozen soldiers to fight off an alien invasion. UFO Defense was a lot more about tedium and logistics than actual strategy, okay the soldiers need bullets for their guns but I need to restock them between each mission or they'll forget to bring ammo? That's not the kind of micromanagement I'd like to be doing between researching alien tech, building new and unique equipment and facilities while staving off an alien invasion. I consider the chances in the new X-Com basically to say that for any reasonable engagement, the soldiers will have bullets because practically they'll either kill the enemy or be killed before they run out. The reload time also makes you cut down on the spray-and-pray tactics. Standard issue is maybe 2-3 grenades, I agree it's an oversimplification but it also means you get to pick the pros and cons not just throw whichever grenade is best all the time.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

I've been up and down a lot of kilos and quite frankly the more overweight you are, the harder it is to lose weight. While keeping your weight is all about diet, losing weight through under-nourishing yourself is extremely frustrating and slow, with the body constantly nagging you with hunger and being fatigued from lack of the nutrients it can't get from fat. So that's the supply side, on the consumption side it's not much better. When my BMI was closing on 40 my endurance was next to nothing, I'd be exhausted and get pains from wobbling around long before I could burn any significant amount of calories.

Of course I had to stop the overeating that brought me there in the first place, but to go beyond that and get a real deficit going so I could lose weight working out was essential. When you don't work out the body is storing it as fat as quickly as possible to make you hungry again, but when you exercise regularly the body seems to keep more energy around in stand-by. That makes a huge difference in reducing your calorie intake without any herculean feat of will power. Plus carrying that weight becomes so much easier with a little muscle, it won't make you slim but it will make life much easier all the same.

Well, unless you count psychological problems as medical problems like for example depression/bipolar causing binge eating and such. For most it's simply a problem of diet and exercise, but for it's a side effect of a more serious underlying condition.

You're probably not in violation of any law unless there's some bat shit crazy laws about conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Your friend though might be in trouble, depending on how often he provides a "taxi" service to other people. In our tax system the condition (translated) is:

"A sustained activity which is likely to provide net income and operated by the taxpayer at its own expense and risk."

The key points here is
a) Sustained, one-offs or highly irregular activities don't count
b) Provide net income, activities that are mostly a loss are generally not deductible
c) You're not in an employment relationship, you make your own business

This has been applied broadly, if you're a prostitute and make a living from it you're committing tax fraud by not reporting it. Professional poker players have been hit with back taxes. You might say it's crude and after-the-fact but if you lose money it's a hobby, if you make money it's a business. Just like Al Capone they don't need to prove you did anything illegal, only that you failed to pay your income taxes.

Never played the game. Didn't even know the concept was discussed in it.

And, on a relative scale, yes it's not hard. It's certainly far easier than sending a ship to trade with someone that far away. In fact, nearly all of the problems of interstellar travel go away in this case - the basic fact is that not having to slow down when you get there (and not caring about the safety of any occupants in the vehicle) makes the issue massively easier. You don't have to worry about fuel, or shielding, or long-term biological maintenance. Just accelerate it up to speed and have a few final maneuvering thrusters on an automatic system.

Of course, if you are traveling around you've solved those problems, and can if you wish launch from within your target's solar system. Which makes targeting much easier, though you may give yourself away as you get the weapon up to speed.

On the other hand, hiding isn't as hard as you might think, especially if life (but not sentient life) is moderately common. Most of it even makes economic sense: Keep your transmissions low powered and focused so there isn't much leakage, and keep the atmosphere fairly clean. That will make it nearly impossible to tell an 'inhabited' system from a 'life-bearing' system from any distance.

Of course any aliens could be proactive and be striking at any life-bearing system, although that's a lot of wasted effort. Still, even then if we were to move into space-based colonies and asteroids we could hide fairly effectively. (Again, communication would be the biggest leaker, but economics and the square cubed law help the hider out.)

Or the TL;DR version: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Companies are not your friends, they're temporary allies as the underdog seeks to become top dog but will abandon you when they no longer need your support. They make more money that way.

This is a reasonable fear - and the problem is unless you are sure the universe isn't that competitive, it actually makes sense to assume it is. Because it's not hard to build a relativistic weapon your target would never see coming, and would wipe them out with one hit. (And we wouldn't see much evidence of them out there, even if they were fairly common - they look like any other floating rock, really.)

So the moment you announce yourself you could become a target for an unknown assailant who will kill you before you know they are there. Run the odds on whether you want to chance announcing yourself then, and realize everyone else who might be out there is doing the same...

Which is why more and more of the essential code goes to live on their servers, not your client. Photos, audio and video are "trivial" in the sense that if you capture the output you're done. Applications and games? It's a cat and mouse game but if "always online single player" wins I think DRM does too.

Most of the new Internet users are now mobile, people get smartphones before they get computers, the cheapest Android phone I could find around here now is $40 with a 240x320 crap screen and they'd still need a cell phone. I don't know and I've never bothered to find out what my IP address is when I'm on the phone. So I figure the Internet will continue to grow, you'll probably pay another $1/month if you want an IPv4 address and a lot of people won't bother. A lot of people don't run servers or host games or use P2P, for example I don't think my parents would notice if they no longer had a public IPv4. As long as they can browse the web and pay their bills and check their email they're happy. And don't forget how many are now using "the cloud", all their own devices are just clients that run client-to-server not peer-to-peer.