That is indeed the problem. Unicode took the problems with ASCII and made them worse in many ways. It's become a very difficult problem to fix.

I think the new encoding would have to have a robust set of conversion tools, but that might be the best way to get it adopted. If it could solve developer's issues with Unicode it might gain popularity.

For case insensitive comparisons specifically I would suggest creating a character coding system where a certain number of bits are allocated to that specifically. Say the top 4 bits, so you can have a maximum of 16 characters that are all comparable when case is not considered. You would probably standardize on a 32 bit per character encoding, because the whole UC8/16 mess just leads to issues and these days we can afford to spend 4x as many bits as we did in the 1960s.

Then comparing characters is as simple and fast as masking off those bits, and deal with some related issues in non-Latin languages. It would be fully backward and forward compatible, so no need to care about the version of the encoding in use.

Yeah, and that's why we need an official support library that handles that kind of thing and tells you when it doesn't make sense.

Well that's why I mentioned that Unicode is deficient because it lacks any concept of languages, only characters.

The use case is that most files are stored on case insensitive filesystems, at least on personal computers, because of NTFS and FAT.

Moderators had email addresses leaked in the hack. Many of them contained their real names.

Most people seem to agree that to make a living from YouTube you need other revenue streams, like affiliate links and merchandise. That's one of the reasons why the Honey browser extension caused so much harm - it stole affiliate link revenue on a massive scale.

I don't think it was ever about the real danger posed. You could take up to 1 litre of liquid on board, it just had to be in 10 x 100ml bottles.

I don't think you could make a very effective bomb out of an iPad. There isn't much room in there for the explosive, and the shape doesn't lend itself to directing the blast to cause maximum damage. It has to get through the x-ray machine as well.

Ideally Unicode would come with a nice library that handles all that stuff for you. Unfortunately Unicode is kinda broken so it's not nearly as easy to do as it should be, but it's not impossible.

I'd implement it as language metadata, which is where the current implementation of Unicode is lacking because it is focused entirely on characters, and wrongly merged some of them too. Anyway, language metadata, which is then used to generate libraries for different languages and operating systems, so for the developer it's largely transparent. Make it so that developers don't need to understand languages, but can still write code that works for all of them.

Part of it is because Unicode is broken and doesn't provide adequate support to developers. Part of it is because major operating systems like Windows are case insensitive and developers are really looking for how best to support NTFS and FAT, not how to avoid security issues on Linux.

Replacing Unicode would do a lot to help with this. Most of the rest is down to less than ideal operating system design.

I've heard that too, the Bose are very comfortable, as are the Sony's. It's just the portability question, when travelling the earbuds are obviously going to be smaller and lighter, but also easier to lose. Maybe instead of getting one pair for everything the solution is to just get one dedicated to home use but without the noise cancelling, and one set of travel headphones.

One thing I really miss are good on-ear cans. They are comfortable and don't get so hot in the summer, but they seem to have gone out of fashion. I'm still using 25 year old Sennheiser wired ones, but you can't get parts for them so I've been DIYing the foam pads.

We need to seriously think about at least mirroring stuff like Wikipedia and maybe the Internet Archive outside the US. Ideally in multiple different countries on different continents.

It's no small task but things can go bad, anywhere.

Just wait until they get rocks back from Mars first.

I was thinking about going that route too. Maybe some Sonys because they have noise cancelling for travel too, but I can't decide been cans and in ear ones.

You need a decent surround sound system that reproduces the centre channel clearly and ideally at a higher volume than the rest, because that's where the speech is. You also need a room with suitable acoustics, or a fancy sound system that can adapt to yours.

It also helps to be on the younger side because your hearing just naturally deteriorates as you get older, no matter what you do to protect it.

Kinda. China is playing the role of adult in the room very well here, trying to take over the role that the US is vacating as a global economic superpower and trading partner.