Pretty much everybody has a hard time grasping English, even other speakers of Indo-European languages.

All languages pick up loanwords from other languages, but English has a couple of... special... habits as far as this is concerned. Loanwords are perhaps the toughest: all languages pick up words from other languages when they come into contact, but most languages adapt the spelling and surrounding grammar into their own systems. English doesn't normally do that: it preserves the original spelling and often the original grammar, which sounds great until you realize that now you've just grafted a new set of rules into the English language for this particular situation.

That's where a lot of the complexity of English really comes from. It's actually a lot more regular than many people think, but at any given time it can work according to any of a staggering number of different rulesets, and to know which ruleset you need to use, you have to know which languages your words are coming from, which English doesn't really have a way of encoding, and very few people, even among teachers of the language, actually know what all of the rulesets are, so you probably don't know them all either (nor do I).

It's like playing Mao with words.

Abram de Swaan identified a list of twelve "supercentral languages" that he believed serve as extremely common bridges among speakers of different languages in their native dialects. If one considers the region that people in English-speaking countries typically think of as "Asia," four of the supercentral languages are native to that region: Chinese (specifically Mandarin), Hindi, Malay (of which Indonesian is a dialect), and Japanese. This list was probably a strong factor when they were deciding which languages to use.

Geographically speaking, there are actually two other languages on the list that are native to the Asian continent: Arabic and Russian. I doubt, however, that the people drawing up these lists considered the regions these languages are from to be "real Asia." Make of that what you will.

(Incidentally, the other six languages are English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili).

We've probably got a bunch of fakes too: they make good decoys for those who would try to attack or steal our weapons. They're probably better-made, but they're fakes all the same.

The real question is, does North Korea have any of these long-range missiles that aren't fake?

And where's the money to develop new versions coming from?

From sales of those versions. Business is a risk. That's how it works.

They have to find ways of forcing people to upgrade to pay for the development cost.

They could do it the old-fashioned way: by developing compelling new features that people want to use. Or has that become too difficult over the years?

How do you put Gecko on an Android device?

The reason the world needs another mobile OS is the people making the current ones. Apple wants my money, Google wants my data, and Microsoft wants my patience, and frankly, I'm not inclined to give them these things. That leaves me out in the cold unless another mobile OS comes along.

I'm glad they got one of them alive. Not that I'd have shed any tears if they'd both died -living is better than what they deserve- but when one of these folks can be taken alive, it opens up opportunities for study that could prove valuable. Definitely preferable, when it can be helped.

Nothing so grand as all that. It's a price: it just happens that that the author (or team) accepts code, rather than money, as payment.

I see nothing wrong with that. Nowadays, contributing back is simply expected behavior, but this was not always so. The current BSD/MIT/CC0/etc regime would likely not have been possible if the GPL had not existed to create and enforce this behavior pattern in the first place. One could argue that it has outlived its necessity, but it was once necessary, and one can just as easily argue that it still is.

I'm curious now: what does BSD do to enforce openness of code that the public domain doesn't (presupposing the existence of a meaningful public domain, even though there are parts of the world there this doesn't hold)?

Actually, going BSD pretty much does mean you give up on copyleft. It doesn't mean you give up on open-source, of course, but copyleft -the idea of using copyright to enforce the openness of your code- is not a part of BSD, and is in fact the Big Sticking Point of the GPL for many people.

Unfortunately, the man has something of a point. There are a lot of 14-year-old basement dwellers in the anti-CISPA crowd, and a lot of people who just want to get their entertainment without paying for it. In short, a significant number of the people who oppose CISPA are doing it for the wrong reasons. CISPA is wrong, but so are they.

Those of us who care about the real issues might do well to disassociate ourselves from the creepers and the pirates. Even they need protection, but let's not kid ourselves, that's more a matter of logistics than principle: protection is meaningless if it doesn't protect everyone, and so they get a pass in order to make it work at all. Their voices in this debate only harm the side they fight for. But this presents a problem: how the heck would a community like this disassociate itself from its less savory members?

The people worried about GMO for health reasons are, at this point, not in much of a better position than the antivaxers. That's not to say that GMOs are totally harmless, but the problems they cause are not the sorts of problems that labeling can address. The economic harm wrought by, for example, Monsanto's terminator seeds and relentless gene patenting far outweigh any actual health risks that these organisms can possibly pose.

We do tend to draw pictures of globes with America in the center (or top-center), though.

They should totally photoshop KJU's head onto some Chris-Chan stuff.

When you know who the foxes are, you keep closer watch over the henhouse. That just makes sense. It can be argued that there's still a role for inclusivity, but it has to be tempered with a dose of common sense.