How do they know the growth in traffic wouldn't have been bigger without the rideshare apps? The convenience they offer may have reduced the growth in private car ownership, and hence total car journeys. You absolutely can't just count the number of rideshare journeys, and say the only difference without rideshare would be those journeys disappearing. It completely depends how rideshare affects every other type of journey.

You have to keep pro-Brexit Facebook ads in perspective:

• The UK government spent more than Vote Leave's entire legal spending limit on a pro-Remain leaflet
• They enlisted Obama to state (incorrectly, it turns out) that the UK would be at the "back of the queue" for a trade deal
• They enlisted the IMF to state (incorrectly, it turns out) that a Leave vote would result in a recession by 2017
• Serious consideration is being given to a second referendum to overturn the first, which would never have happened if the result had been the other way — even if the EU continued its rapid evolution into a superstate
• much more

This level of gaming the system clearly dwarfs a few Facebook ads

What does it say about the NSA, if lone security researcher finds and activates a kill switch before they do?

So they can snoop on and store an entire nation's web traffic and email, but they can't analyse a small piece of malware, notice it queries some domain name, and then discover (in a test environment) that the existence of the domain stops the malware from propagating? And then activate the domain to give the world a few hours respite?

Sure, now there's a new version without a kill switch, but the brief respite will have given millions of people the opportunity to secure their machines. It seems a pretty pathetic state of affairs when the NSA pours vast sums of money into nefarious snooping, yet can't keep pace with a single security researcher when it comes to *actually* helping keeping the nation secure.

Same goes for other countries' intelligence agencies, e.g. GCHQ.

It's more complicated than that. The judgement accepts that the so-called "royal prerogative" (which really means government power) includes making and unmaking treaties. But it argues that since the EU treaties (uniquely) can override UK legislation, they must be immune to the royal prerogative (else the royal prerogative can override UK legislation, which they think is a contradiction).

Personally I think that argument is fallacious (e.g. the government has repeatedly voted in the Council of Ministers to accept new EU members, which has overridden UK legislation too). But the judges are trying to choose which constitutional principles to uphold in the face of the European Communities Act 1972 which radically altered the UK constitution without specifying how to resolve such contradictions. So I think it's hard to predict whether the Supreme Court will overturn the judgement on appeal — but in any case, we shouldn't attack the judges, because the legislative situation is contradictory enough that there's no very clean way to rule on this.

For the uninformed, the EU is undemocratic: no legislation can be passed without the say-so of unelected bureaucrats (the European Commission) which voters cannot feasibly remove from power (because the system for appointing them is highly indirect and opaque). Much opposition to the EU stems from this. UK democracy isn't perfect (e.g. voting isn't proportional, and the unelected House of Lords can delay legislation) but voters can and do change the government and change policy direction through the ballot box.

Because it makes every other language seem easy. Because for a long time no-one had successfully written a program. Because the first published program was bred, not written, and printed "HEllO WORld" - getting the casing right was too hard. Because it took extensive cryptan.alysis to implement a basic 'cat' program.

"...adds 7,716 new characters to the existing 21,499 – that's more than 35% growth!"

There were already 113K characters in Unicode version 7.0. Which is more than 2^16 characters, so remember:

• 1. UTF-16 is *not* two bytes per character
• 2. Therefore a "character" in Java, C#, Javascript sometimes only holds half a Unicode character
• 3. Even a whole unicode character may be only part of a grapheme cluster, which means that taking arbitrary substrings may not result in readable text.

The article is based on three huge false premises: 1. That languages become simpler as they're spread by adult learners. This is false because the simplifications (say, loss of Old English case endings) trigger new complexities (in this instance, new word order rules). 2. That tonal languages are especially hard for learners. Actually, many features of English are equally hard if your language doesn't have them: consonant clusters, tenses, stress timing etc. 3. That Mandarin cannot dominate because Chinese characters are too hard. But Pinyin romanization (i.e. Latin letters) is simple, easy, and known by native speakers and learners alike. so it could be that Chinese written in Pinyin comes to dominate outside China.

UK = England + Scotland + Wales + Northern Ireland. The central government only controls education policy for England, not for the rest of the UK. State-funded schools in Scotland and Wales were never permitted to teach creationism. I don't know the situation in Northern Ireland but it may be different.

A data centre in Hong Kong would have been a turnaround for Google, since it very publicly pulled out of the country after attacks on Gmail which it blamed on the Chinese government in 2010.

This is incorrect -- Google pulled out of Mainland China, not Hong Kong. The author seems unaware, but Hong Kong has different laws from the Mainland, including data privacy and free speech. In fact, since Google pulled out of mainland China, www.google.cn actually shows a redirect link to www.google.com.hk .

It was equally ineffective in Wales until they (a) required all shops to charge, and (b) required them to donate the proceeds to charity. Now it's normal to carry reusable bags and few people seem to object.

India, he "I" in BRICS, has a high proportion of vegetarians. This is true in the prosperous areas as well as the poorest.

My father remembers sending food parcels in the 1970s from the UK to relatives in mainland China. Now, starvation is almost unknown there. Yet, China was a more equal society in the 1970s -- virtually everyone was extremely poor.

A central reason that Mosley won the original privacy case in the High Court in London is that the judge rejected News Group Newspapers' claim that it was a "Nazi" scenario because they were speaking German (see paragraph 72 of the judgment). The judge found that there was no reason to think the orgy was Nazi-themed, and therefore there was no public interest to justify the privacy violation.

should be more widely understood than it is. Even English-only programmers need to know enough to avoid security holes. You can't normally be sure you're writing safe software unless you know a little about Unicode. In this sense, it's like structured programming, and unlike most other things on the original list.