Quite frankly, Unicode works well right now, provided you use UTF-8 or UTF-32. UTF-16 and surrogate pairs is really quite an ugly hack, and 16-bits are obviously not enough when we need nearly 21 bits to encode all the existing characters already. UTF-8 is quite elegant (compatible with ASCII, but easily countable and self-synchronizing) and UTF-8 can easily be extended to 31 bits, should we need more codepoints in the future. UTF-16 can't be extended in any easy way and will just become a nightmare to support, should future versions of Unicode decide to start using codepoints above U+10FFFF

It's basically bigger banks or the central government charging smaller banks to keep their money. The idea is to encourage lending and spur the economy. No personal checking/savings account has negative interest that I've heard of (yet?).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01... - Japan this year

I looked into this before, and in the newer setups like my laptop, it seems common that your choices for GPU in the BIOS are Intel-only, or Hybrid. You cannot select just the nVidia one. There is probably some reason in the hardware that it's not possible now.

Even with the crummy update that Google didn't need to do, Google Maps runs significantly faster and smoother on way older, slower hardware (custom built desktops) where there is not a hybrid GPU setup. Having a 100% dedicated nVidia card that everything always uses is great. Having an Intel GPU that is used for anything at all makes having the nVidia GPU a pointless waste of money when buying a laptop.

Basically, the end result is that I paid extra for an nVidia card when I bought this, thinking it would *replace* the Intel one, but it did not. Several desktop computers I built from parts all work just fine with nVidia cards, and don't have an Intel GPU or funny Optimus drivers getting in the way of things. Google maps always runs super fast and smooth, and nothing ever crashes. Next time I buy a laptop, I'm going to pay extra attention, and if you can't entirely 100% disable the Intel GPU, then there is zero point to having the nVidia GPU added on.

The nVidia driver actually greyed out and prevents you from selecting the nVidia GPU for apps in it's known-list. Firefox and Chrome are on the list of programs that can only use the Intel GPU. You can always copy Firefox.exe to Firefox2.exe and then it's not on the known-list. You can browse to it from the nVidia control panel thing, then set that to use the nVidia GPU. Unfortunately, it tends to crash the whole OS a lot if you do that, which seems pretty ridiculous. I tried both Firefox and Chrome and eventually gave up and left them on the Intel GPU.

On my laptop, no. You CAN disable the nVidia GPU though.

What "either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a powerful GeForce GTX 960M" means is that the nVidia driver will make regular windows, and apps like Firefox/Chrome use the slow Intel card for all your regular stuff. Google maps or anything that uses WebGL will slow to a crawl. Only games are "allowed" to run on the real GPU.
At least, that's how the last laptop I got a year ago with a setup like that worked...
I have a Core i7-4500U, 16GB RAM, and a GT735M, and it is absolutely painful to use certain things like Google Maps.

So many developers reflexively include tons of jQuery and Bootstrap CSS/JS files, 99% of which aren't used on the entire site. Just because that's the only way some people know how to "code" web sites. When you add in jQueryUI and a bunch of FontAwesome fonts that aren't used either, I'm surprised some people could write a single "Hello World" page in under 20MB.

Why do I have a 6.55GB $Windows.~BT folder if it won't let me upgrade yet? If it already downloaded everything at some point, shouldn't the install just start? Why stagger the installs and not the downloads? I thought the point was to not hammer the servers with lots of downloads at once...

I'm pretty sure this stupid hybid GPU system is the reason I need Sony-specific drivers and the Intel/nVidia default graphic drivers just make things run super super slow. I do suspect the current 8/8.1 drivers will work just fine on 10 though, but Sony's official position is to not install Windows 10 until after November right now.

Given how bad the stock Intel and nVidia drivers make my Vaio Flip 15 function compared to the modified Sony ones, I'm pretty worried about upgrading to Windows 10. Drivers aren't going to be available until November according to Sony - http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/... - because mine came with 8 (not 8.1) preinstalled, even though 8.1 was out at the time.

Except while that is called "Hyphen-Minus" and can be used for two things, Unicode does try to solve that problem by having:
00AD Soft Hyphen
2010 Hypen
2011 Non-Breaking Hyphen
2012 Figure Dash
2013 En Dash
2014 Em Dash
2015 Horizontal Bar
2212 Minus Sign
2796 Heavy Minus Sign

There is no "Mathematical Hiragana No" glyph defined by Unicode, and as such, it should never be rendered in a different font just because somebody *might* use it in a formula. The application is wrong, and there is no bug in Unicode.

I'm aware of the problems with the han unification and certain Kanji being displayed "wrong" because the Chinese equivalent is drawn significantly different from the Japanese Kanji, but this doesn't seem to be anything close to that kind of problem. I'm also aware of the Unicode block U+1D400 "Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols" which is what should be used for formulas. Any application that is rendering one particular character in the Hiragana block in a different font than the rest of the Hiragana block, is quite frankly, just rendering it wrong. The bug is with the application as far as I'm concerned, and this clearly does not impact default system rendering or any common web browsers as far as I can see either.

Hotmail/MSN/Outlook mail is well known for just not delivering lots of legitimate mail now. You may not see spam there, but you may not get mail from a friend who doesn't use common webmail like gmail or Yahoo. The mail does not even go to your junk/spam folders, and it does not get bounced to the sender. They just silently accept and delete incoming mail, without any notification.

I'd, personally, rather see spam getting through than email become a useless technology that fades away because people can't rely on it anymore.