It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.

Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.

«As a whole» leaves unclear whether your example means the kind itself, its members generally or every member without exception as they are three distinct interpretations. This is what I have remarked on.

«Cats meow» attributes characteristic behaviour to cats generally.

«Dinosaurs are extinct» attributes a property to a kind, making it a better example supporting kind reference.

The latter also establishes that English bare plurals can denote kinds. Their grammatical form does not guarantee that interpretation: «cats entered the dumpster» concerns individual cats on a particular occasion.

No. That is, at best, a highly informal proposition and, at worst, a frivolous disposition masquerading as a definition of «category».

Bare plurals can have generic or kind-related interpretations (the one you refer to as «category»); they do not entail reference to every individual member of the class: a mute cat can't meow, and a rotten apple is unlikely to be liked.

The Obama analogy illustrates reference vs mention, but that distinction is orthogonal to the actual semantic disagreement.

  einar buksur (feminine plural) – a pair of pants

  einir skógvar (masculine plural) – a pair of shoes

Both are count nouns, and, in English, a plural count noun takes the null article when it is used with generic or non-specific indefinite reference rather than to denote a contextually identifiable set.

However, in

  Cat is divided into numerous breeds.

  Cat excludes animals such as dogs and foxes.

  Apple excludes such fruits as pears and peaches.

  Apple contains numerous cultivated varieties.

In the 80-90's, the most popular destination for Australians was the UK: Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Lisa Gerrard (of Dead Can Dance fame) and many others moved up there.

Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.

Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later.

Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents.

Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary.

Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary.

The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China.

Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in:

  明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō)

  明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler».

明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty.

Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.

Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.

Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).

They can be rendered as:

  Kanō: 狩野 and 加納

  Gotō: 後藤 and 五島

The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.

加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.

後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.

五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.

None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.

Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.

[0] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209

[1] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984

[2] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%8...

[3] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019

Moldova switched for a similar reason as Moldovans speak Romanian, and they did so to align themselves with Romania.

That is a total of five countries.

The actual history is rather more nuanced, as after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – intent, at least in principle, upon eradicating Great-Russian chauvinism and weakening the Russian cultural dominance – introduced the policy of «korenizatsiia», or «nativisation».

The new policy encouraged non-Russian populations to cultivate distinct national identities, use their own languages in administration and education and, where indigenous languages had previously lacked established writing systems, develop scripts and literary standards of their own:

«Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic»[0].

For that reason, nearly all new writing scripts developed between 1920's and mid-1930's were Latin based.

Joseph Stalin, a Georgian himself, ended and reversed the policy in the mid-1930's and instructed the Latin-based scripts to be replaced with the Cyrillic-based ones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia

In Norway, Telia shut down 2G in 2025, but Telenor is holding out until the end of 2027.

In Sweden, Telia is holding until 2027, and all other telcos have already switched it off.

France is shutting down 2G this year.

So the 2G shutdown is a real thing.

I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.

My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.

That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.

Moreover, since GCC was one of the very few C compilers that targeted a large number of very diverse ISA's at the time, they wanted to have a uniform way of injecting the assembly code across wildly varying ISA's.

Historically, some ISA's have adopted the «src, dst» convention, whilst others have preferred «dst, src». We should be grateful that no engineer, in a moment of excessive creativity, attempted boustrophedon – a conceptual device solely appropriate to the likes of INTERCAL. Then we have 3 operand RISC instructions.

As with so many technical orthodoxies, the first convention one encounters tends thereafter to acquire the status of natural law.

The consistent application of the same convention is useful nevertheless. It reduces the unnecessary cognitive overload once one starts jumping across multiple hardware architectures.

In Chrome/Chromium, Manifest v3 largely replaces extension-controlled network blocking with a more restrictive «declarativeNetRequest», whereas Firefox, by contrast, has deliberately kept support for blocking «webRequest» functionality.

Importantly, the full uBlock Origin is a Manifest V2 extension. The Manifest v3-compatible version is uBlock Origin Lite, which has fewer capabilities.

Being able to store, e.g. 10 vs 5, local variables in a larger register file has performance implications[0] strong enough to consider larger register files an advantage.

[0] The reduced number of memory-to-CPU and vice versa data transfers for transient computation results.

RISC vendors were in the business of selling hi-end workstations and servers that required their own respective RISC CPU's, which meant that each vendor had its own, in-house CPU design arm and either their own fab or they outsourced the CPU manufacturing to someone else. In a way, the RISC CPU was a by-product of what they sold but never the product they sold alone. Two problems followed.

The CPU design is an expensive process, and keeping one's own fabs up to date with the latest and greatest manufacturing process is even more expensive, especially as the designs and processes advanced. It eventually became prohibitively expensive to maintain one's own fab, and RISC vendors started falling behind the bleeding edge (DEC, Motorola, etc.). IBM managed to get away with it for a time, but eventually, they also divested.

The second problem concerned the outsourcing of the CPU manufacturing. Those RISC vendors (e.g. SGI with their MIPS) who did not have their own fabs had to contract a fab (e.g. NEC). Such a fab would produce a diverse range of microchip products, and a CPU would be just one of them. Which typically meant not the latest and greatest process, but at least a generation behind.

Whereas both Intel and AMD were dedicated CPU design and manufacturing houses (although AMD also divested their fabs later), so they could specifically focus on what mattered for CPU's and for CPU's only.

That said, for Intel and AMD, the CPU was the product, whereas for the RISC vendors, it was not, however important, the CPU was for them.

I also hold over a decade worth of zsh history and revisit it from time to time to reconstruct the full memory of what I was working on N years ago.