Yeah - being able to buy an equivalently or better specced machine then a MacBook Prop for less money has always been an option - that has not stopped people from buying MacBooks in the past, so I fail to see the news here. Now, I agree that the new MacBook Pros are a bit disappointing, and that there might be other laptops which compete very well. But the laptop mentioned in this slashvertisement fails to impress.

Yes, this is mostly memory related. Browsers have a tendency to either crash when parsing all the code, or to run out of memory when trying to allocate the memory for the game itself (which emscripten implements using a single big array of bytes in JavaScript). See http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual...

Well, benchmark results don't really have any units but are arbitrary numbers.

Though, yes, it would have been better to label it with something like "results, higher is better", as that is not clear from the graphs.

Well, the benchmarks speak a very different story. While IE is slow beyond use, Edge with asm.js actual performs pretty well, much better then Chrome.

In general, I am very happy with the direction MS is taking with Edge, and have so far found it not to be "the new IE" at all, quite to the contrary. Following open web standards, maintaining public page to track new developments (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatus.modern.ie), great performance - all of this sounds very promising to me.

Now, if there is any good chance to smuggle a bomb into the white house, this is it.

A very similar question was in an XKCD "What If?", but only in the printed book version (which has a bunch of extra chapters compared to the blog): "What would be the last artificial light source to glow when all humans were gone".

IIRC, the conclusion was that it would be status LEDs on space probes or radiation glow from buried nuclear waste.

I was there in 2011, and similarly, I found most larger towns to have an "internet cafe" in the offices of the government operated phone agency. Access was not obviously restricted, but indeed very slow - and expensive at around 8 CUC (=8 USD)/h. If cubans were to pay the same rates, it would be well out of their reach (but I don't know if that's the case, a lot of services in Cuba charge exchangeable CUC to foreigners, but local CUP to Cubans (25 CUP = 1 CUC)).

A lot of people working in any kind of government agencies (universities, etc) would have internet access as work, though.

I think internet access at home is rare (and possibly illegal), and usually only if someone secretly sets up a modem at their work place to dial in from home (they have an extensive wire telephone systems, which is state run, and free to use).

Sorry, wasn't clear enough. "Bikes" as in "Motorbikes".

Police may stop and fine you if your bicycle is not in order, especially if your lights don't work. Whether they actually do that varies a lot between cities.

I currently live in Germany and the technical inspections are all safety related, not cosmetic issues like rust.

Well, they can make a good case for issues to be "safety related". For any older car, rust *is* usually the deal breaker (as it reduces the integrity of the chassis - which is true, but I don't believe that it is indeed a cause for many traffic related injuries which would not happen otherwise). In fact, if your car is old enough to have historic plates, they are actually entitled to complain about cosmetic issues, as the historic plate mandates the car to be kept in a state "worth preserving". Ie, stuff like ("You need to repaint the valve cover in your engine bay as the paint on it became dated").

Regardless of that, I've had inspectors complain about tons of "safety" issues in my car or bikes over the years, including:

-Ripped seat cover ("passenger might be injured if a spring pokes out")
-Missing isolation cap on battery pole ("electical fire hazard")
-little skull shaped caps on tire valves ("not allowed")
-fan would not work on highest setting ("no guarantee of adequate cooling of passengers if going at high temperatures")
-Worn out seat
-Motorcycle not equipped with a steering column lock
-Motorcycle would engine would not auto-shut off when extending footstand (bike was made before these became standard, but that did not matter, had to retrofit)

(These are some examples - I've also met many inspectors much more reasonable then that, but still, I am convinced that the car industry is actually pushing for tighter inspections, as it will mean more new car sells. The car industry is the biggest arm of the german economy, and they do have a lot of power.)

Except for the fact that that video is taken in Belgium.

This is true. But I doubt that the US has a high rate of dangerous traffic accidents caused by failing cars. I have always felt that the technical inspections we have serve more to subsidize the car industry (by making sure old cars are taken off the road due to some rust or whatever they will come up with), and as a self-service to the inspection agencies to keep them in business. I guess regular brake & light checkups would make sense, but beyond that, I really doubt that there is much actual improvements in safety to be gained.

Replying to myself: My Google skills mislead me, that wikipedia link referred to the Republic of China (Taiwan), not mainland China (which does seem to have capital punishment on drug trafficking, no idea how commonly it is applied).

I don't think so. Actually, drugs seem to be very easy to come by in China (At least that was my impression in Beijing earlier this year).

While the death penalty for drug trade exists on paper, according to wikipedia, it has not been applied in over a decade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

"Education rates" and "Standards of living" or somewhat subjective and thus hard to compare (though I guess what you say is true for many countries, with notable exceptions). "Literacy rates" are hard comparable numbers, and looking at that Cuba is not doing bad:

Literacy in Cuba 99.8%
Literacy in US 99%

Source: CIA World fact book: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cia.gov%2Flibrary%2Fpu...

While it is very true that horn usage has very different cultural implications around the world, characterizing every country outside of the US as "overseas" is a wrong over-generalisation. Most northern-european countries have a very similar interpretation of the horn as you described in the US (minus the part why people get out to kick your ass, usually).