It's actually older than Confucius, including the bit about the state getting to define what is and is not "harmonious." Needless to say, it has been popular with the various rulers of China ever since.

Yeah; I miss the old Google, and I'm glad to see a little of it shining through here. This should be encouraged.

Mostly by the fact that the various camps in this conflict do not fit neatly into the simple dichotomy that we in the West -myself included, much of the time- find it all too easy to draw. There is a spectrum, and the various groups fall into various points among it.

I agree with you that people should never be barred from education on account of gender, but note that I used the word never: a word I think you would also be willing to use. That's an extreme term, in the sense that there's no way to go further, and that puts us solidly on an endpoint of the spectrum. This isn't a bad thing, but we need to acknowledge where we are, because it means that we have a question of idealism versus pragmatism to consider.

In a place like Afghanistan, support for our side therefore depends in large part on which groups we are willing to accommodate and which we are not. If we accommodate only those which agree with us in total, we will never get anything done. The pragmatic way takes longer, but it is less likely to be pulled out from under us in one stroke by the likes of the Taliban. If this is worth doing -and I think it is- then it's worth doing in a way that will stand up to the next hundred years of conflict.

I'll give them IE6 and IE7. I'd give an awful lot to not have to support IE8, even. But there really isn't any reason to not support IE9, unless you need WebGL for something. A lot can be said about Microsoft's past shenanigans in the browser space, and none of it is good, but they pretty much cleaned up their act with IE9, and that should be acknowledged and encouraged.

Though I'm still suspicious of their WebGL stance. That sounds, much like the NPAPI plugin thing in the past, more like a simple attempt at lock-in than an actual security concern.

That's not actually the case: they're close enough geographically that for any given object in the sky, there is a window of time when it will be visible from both regions (day/night doesn't matter, since the telescopes don't use visible light). That object will certainly be in a different part of the sky in each region, but both should still be able to focus on it during the time when it's visible to both.

What this does do is shrink the aforementioned window of time, because the object has to be visible from both spots or the scheme doesn't work. Whether or not this is a really problem depends on what they use the telescope for. Evidently they don't think it will be an unacceptable thing.

My personal gripe with this is more from an engineering perspective than a scientific one (since I don't know enough about the science to judge one country as a particularly better location than another). The design didn't call for the thing to be split, much less between two continents. A cross-continental instrument could be interesting, but if they were going to do that then they should have designed for it. As it stands, I fail to see how this can possibly do anything but harm to the instrument.

You're right that words become tokens, but most people's vocabulary is a lot larger than the number of printable ASCII characters. This is why the scheme stands up to the problem you mention. Even with a bare-bones vocabulary of 800 words, a five-word phrase is stronger than an eight-character string of alphanumerics. Most people's vocabulary is larger than that.

If we're going to be pedantic, would you prefer "emergent vs. engineered" to "organic vs. artificial"?

One could argue that the bundling was the "behind-the-scenes shenanigans to inflate their numbers," particularly given common browser bundling practice at the time (also known as not doing it). That argument would be much weaker in today's environment, where everyone bundles a browser, but Microsoft's decision was not made in that environment.

TIOBE makes for an interesting toy measure. But for truly reliable conclusions, particularly those related to the health of our favorite technologies, we must instead ask: does NetCraft confirm it?

I don't know; that still sounds like an accurate enough title for the film.