"When you get used to using the term [unpublish] on an everyday basis, its faintly Orwellian overtones disappear."

...a statement which itself sounds a little bit Orwellian.

I can't help but think of the popularly unpopular term "collateral damage", a term which seems to me to serve purpose within a narrow context; it makes sense for the military to use it internally if you accept loss of life as a given and I don't see that there's necessarily any doublespeak involved. Used outside a strictly military context - such as when reporting on military operations to the public, however, it seem extremely disingenuous.

Used often, enough, though, I suppose we just start to accept it and the military context along with it.

Fake or not (I'd say not), the complex folds were generally not performed concurrently. It's an impressive bit of ambidexterity - I was surprised that both cranes came out so well - but to my mind not in the same league as a decent musician who really does have to handle more than one thing going on at the same time. Not that you'll be seeing me demonstrating my own abilities on YouTube anytime soon...

I'd have thought the main advantage to having a shell would be piping the results through grep or sed or whatever for further processing. I tried piping the results of a search through the translator with no success. Pretty, yes, but not very powerful, it seems.

Dubai will make a very nice ghost city. Certainly a better ghost city than whatever it is now.

@24 Agree with the lousy principal bit. Whether the punishment is excessive or not, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason why these kids should get a higher mark in, for example, math than the other kids in the class who pull their pranks on the weekends.

As for the "gold star" - isn't a suspension just about as close as it gets?

Written Chinese is more than just Chinese characters, though. What I mean to say is that substituting 26 Chinese characters at random for our English alphabet would hardly make written English meaningfully different -- it would just make it considerably more difficult to write by hand.

Somehow I suspect that learning Chinese, from zero to the point of fluency, would present much more of a challenge to a dyslexic than simply dealing with dyslexia in their native language(s). Might present an argument for a natively e.g. English/Chinese bilingual kids to preferentially use one language over another in a given context, though? Though there are plenty of other reasons for that already, I suppose.