Okay, so the immigrant workers are going to carry their papers. And many of the illegal ones, or at least the smart ones, will carry forged papers - at least ones good enough to pass cursory inspection.
But what about the native-born citizens? Not everyone has a driver's license (or an Arizona license - would my Virginia driver's license count as "proof of citizenship"?), and I highly doubt citizens will be carrying around their birth certificates or anything - after all, they're not immigrants, why should they be concerned about an immigration law.
This is basically carte blanche for the police to harass anyone, and non-immigrants are going to be surprisingly affected.
In any case, I'm now mentally filing "Arizona" next to "East Germany", because both require me to have my papers in ordnung (and because both are effectively in the past - E.G. literally, Arizona figuratively).
This isn't a courtroom. We don't need "beyond a reasonable doubt".
We have no other reasonable suspects. We have *some* evidence supporting the US/Israel hypothesis. We have motive. We have a lack of denial from the accused.
None of those alone is "proof". Even altogether, it's not "proof", but this is the Court of Public Opinion, not the International Court of Justice.
1) There is no DDR5. There's GDDR5, which is essentially DDR3 optimized for parallel access (graphics cards manufacturers got into a bit of an "our numbers are bigger than their numbers" war a while back). 2) GPU stream processors are *terrible* for database work, and the latency of using GPU memory from the CPU would ruin any advantage GDDR5 memory has. 3) The 4GB cards are, coincidentally, the most expensive ones. I'm talking bare minimum $200-$300.
Yeah. You're better off just stuffing a box full of high-performance DDR3.
I was referring to software-based ramdisks, not RAM-based SSDs. Although I suppose there's not much of a performance difference - the only difference is durability.
It's a bit more complex. There's four main ways to do MySQL storage in RAM (which I know of because my current work project is a MySQL application).
First, the NDB Cluster system is there, which is what you've mentioned. That's basically just a MySQL frontend to a distributed, memory-based NoSQL database, though. Convenient, but not truly "MySQL".
The second is using the "Memory" storage engine, where it actually stores a normal MyISAM table in memory. However, this is a surprisingly crappy option, because it uses table-level locks for writing, so parallel write performance is only marginally faster than disk.
The third is to store regular InnoDB tables on a ramdisk. This can be crazy fast, but it also means that if your server crashes or loses power, you're *fucked*
The fourth is to use Memcached, which isn't really a MySQL thing at all. You're basically just caching data in a memory-only NoSQL database, at the application level. This is actually what we ended up doing, because all the others are pretty crappy options - Cluster is the best one, but the hardware requirements are higher than we could justify spending given our performance requirements. Shoving memcached onto the web server (which has RAM to spare) and setting certain queries to cache their results there sped things up significantly, at minimal cost.
As far as I can tell from the summary (I refuse to read the articles for such a blantant slashvertisement), this "MemSQL" doesn't do anything you can't do by configuring MySQL properly, although they likely optimized some rarely-used modules to make them faster.
"Apparently an Apple employee heard her speaking Farsi. As he was also of Iranian extraction he recognized the language and used this as a basis for refusal."
So this isn't just another case of "racist white guy does something stupid to someone just because they're Middle Eastern*", this is "racist Middle Eastern guy does something stupid to someone just because they're Middle Eastern"
That's... wow. I was not prepared for this level of stupid today.
* Is is really correct to consider Iran "Middle Eastern"? I know they're ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Arabs, and also have a significant religious difference. But geographically (and geo-politically, at least from an American view), you could definitely argue that they are.
Prohibiting people from installing software means they don't trust them to administer their own machines. Which I can actually understand in many situations - do you know how many relatives' computers I've had to fix because they installed some malware or crap?
Prohibiting people from using USB drives means they don't trust them with their own data - worried about data leaks. That's far less common (and far less excusable - unless he's working with *extremely* sensitive data, you need to just trust your employees to do their job right (and pay them enough that they want to)).
Back in school, I put my stuff on a small USB flash drive (at first a 256MB, later a 4GB - both cost about $20 when I got them). For me, it was CodeBlocks, because my personal coding project was in C++, but I imagine you can do the same with nearly any open-source IDE and compiler/interpreter.
Depends. Early Jack Ryan, or crazy-nutso hardline-conservative Jack Ryan, from when Clancy went off his meds?
I used to be a big Clancy reader, but I haven't really kept up. I read the newest one a few months ago, and I was shocked at how much he'd turned it into his own political fantasy. He (or his ghostwriters) pack it with strawmen and the "good guys" are just *loved* by *everyone* who isn't one of those strawmen.
Let's just look at the story. Spoiler alerts, obviously.
A terrorist leader who is/totally/ not Bin Laden gets captured by an illegal, unofficial special forces group (which is a whole rant in itself) and basically dropped off in front of a US jail, Batman-style. The astoundingly stupid President makes a big show out of giving him a trial; his defense attorney is an ACLU hippie woman (whose breasts Clancy devotes a few too many sentences to), and even then this entire subplot is being orchestrated by an ex-Soviet still-Communist media mogul. Jack Ryan, running to be the second president to serve non-consecutive terms, makes it a major campaign issue that he will not give not-Laden an open trial, getting a standing ovation after declaring in a debate that his first act as President would be to ship him off to Gitmo for a secret military trial.
Meanwhile, Ryan's son is off being part of the aforementioned spec-ops group, which operates not just beyond international law, but actually completely without the knowledge or even authorization of the current US government. Let me say that again - a secret group of heavily-armed people who operate completely alone, their only connection to any sort of authority being the bank safe full of blank (but signed) presidential pardons, who fund themselves by tapping into the CIANSA data link and using the data for insider trading, and whose goals are to kill any terrorist threat to America, again, without *any* sort of oversight.
Anyways, Junior's subplot is mainly about a rogue Pakistani general's plot to steal his own country's nuclear weapons and give them to Islamic terrorists in Unpronouncablistan - and *their* plan is to mount them on hijacked space rockets to launch at Moscow. Junior, and his fellow assassins, do this by eventually *invading* Pakistan, with running gun battles through the streets that fit Call of Duty better than Rainbow Six. Oh, and Rainbow does show up again, only to be completely incompetent because international bureaucracy fucks EVERYTHING up. That's almost an exact quote, by the way.
The C-plot is something about Clark tracking down who's behind the A-plot (spoiler: the filthy commie goes to jail too), with the obligatory East Germany/Soviet Russia backstory. Not really anything to it.
There are random asides about irrelevant-to-the-story-but-political-hot-topics like health care (apparently socialized health care is *terrible*, and without CAPITALISM to drive them, doctors just don't give a shit and get drunk during surgeries). That's not even relevant to some D-plot, that's just random pages of POLITICS crammed in there for no good reason.
So yeah. The only good thing I can say is that the actual prose is as good as it ever was - the details of the story are great, the action scenes are actiony, the dialog is good, but the Rand-esque political monologues and overall plot are pretty grating.
I'm not sure if I just didn't really pay much attention to it when I read his books earlier, or if Clancy (or, again, his co-authors) are just nuts.
I think you don't quite know what orthogonal means. Or perhaps it is I who misused it - what I meant was that it is a regular language that tries to follow the "principle of least astonishment".
Esperanto is actually pretty good at being flexible. For example, word order is "whatever the hell you want". Subject-Verb-Object? Fine! Subject-Object-Verb? You bet! Verb-Object-Subject? Why not! You want to put the adjectives next to the opposite nouns from the ones they describe? Perfectly valid, and probably actually useful for some nice wordplay.
In most languages, when a word is taken from another language, it's modified to fit their own grammar and phonology. If I decided Esperanto really needed the word santorum (the noun, not the proper noun), I would modify it so the rules of Esperanto apply (in this case, it would become santoro (santoron in the accusative, santoroj and santorojn in the plural, although I suspect the word is already in use).
English, in a truly out-of-character show of cultural sensitivity, tends to keep the rules of the original language. Which is a problem when you steal (excuse me, *pirate*) words from as many languages as English. So if I decide to import a word from Esperanto that has no English equivalent, I would keep the rules of the original language. Only thing I would probably do is make the spelling fit the pronunciation (ie. santoroy or santoroi, to re-use an example).
Writing drivers is not free. It costs money to hire and pay a development team.
AMD/nVidia would love it if everyone used one version of Windows (even Windows has driver compatibility problems between versions - Vista/7 drivers don't always work on XP/2K, and never on 95/98/ME, and so on). Not to mention 32-bit/64-bit drivers. They would cut their driver development costs dramatically.
On the other hand, users would love it if they supported every single revision of even the most niche OS, from Mac OS 9 to Minix to freaking CP/M.
Obviously, neither extreme is actually viable. At the very least, they'll need to support four Windows drivers (32/64-bit XP and Vista/7, probably going to become Vista/7 and 8 soon), and OS X, if only because between those two you get > 95% of the desktop market (and Apple's willing to subsidize your dev costs because they need it to sell their hardware).
Linux support is iffy because it's just on the border of "is it worth our money to make drivers for this OS?". It's big enough that you'll get *some* sales, but not enough to justify the kind of development work that goes into the Windows drivers. So it seems most companies are content to half-ass it to hedge their bets - if the Year of Linux on the Desktop finally arrives, they can quickly ramp up development and ship out awesome, Grade-A drivers, but if Linux on the desktop totally dies (at least to the level of *BSD), they didn't waste much money.
That also explains, to an extent, why Intel's Linux drivers rock. Intel graphics are found much more often on servers and ultra-portable laptops than AMD/nVidia's graphics. And, coincidentally, Linux dominates the server market, and is making inroads on netbooks and such. So Intel gets much more out of having good Linux drivers (it also helps that to Intel, GPUs are a product bundled with their actual money-maker, while to nVidia GPUs *are* their money-maker).
Standard? Not quite. But there are three different methods, all based around replacing non-ASCII characters with a sequence of two ASCII characters. And each of them is common enough that you'll see them in use.
My own preference is for the use of the caret: ie. rego (with a circumflex over the G that I know/. won't parse) becomes reg^o.
Other systems use H (regho) or X (regxo) for the same purpose. H has the problem of being ambiguous as to whether it's an actual H, or if it's a diacritic replacement. X is not (X is not a letter in Esperanto) but it doesn't quite look as good.
English is the exact opposite of "orthogonal". Nothing makes sense.
Let's just look at the rules for taking a singular noun, and making it plural (paraphrased from Wikipedia's article):
1. If the noun ends in a sibilant consonant sound, suffix -es 1a. unless it ended with a silent E, in which case merely suffix an -s and pronounce the E 2. If it ends with a non-sibilant unvoiced consonant, suffix -s 3. For all others, suffix -s, but pronounce it as -z 3a. Unless it ended with -o, in which case suffix -es and pronounce as an S (provided it is not a loanword from Italian) 3b. Unless it ended with -y, in which case replace with -ies (but ONLY if there is not a vowel before the Y) 3c. Unless the last consonant was an unvoiced fricative, in which case replace with a voiced fricative. Whether or not you should change the spelling varies by word 3d. Unless it is one of the special words that do not change at all between singular and plural 3e. Unless it is one of several Old English words that are suffixed with -en, often changing other parts (ie. brother -> brethren) 3f. Unless it is one of several other Old English words that change certain vowels (ie. foot -> feet) 3g. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -a, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ae 3h. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -us, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -i 3i. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -um, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -a 3j. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -[i|e]x, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ices 3k: Unless it is derived from Greek and ends in -on, in which case follow the Greek rules and replace with -a 3l: Unless it is one of certain words from Hebrew, in which case suffix -im or -ot as appropriate 3m: Unless it is one of other certain exceptions that occur for only one or two words.
Got it?
Now try to list every possible way to pronounce "gh" in a word. You *will* miss some.
Now realize that you have to learn the entire nominative/accusative system common to European languages *just* for a handful of pronouns (see: I vs. Me, We vs. Us). At least in most languages that do that, it applies everywhere.
Yeah, English follows the philosophy of "rules are meant to be broken". *Every* rule has at least one exception. Like how adjectives normally come before the noun, except in weird structures like "notary public".
There's even more things. You know that "th" sound (or rather, sounds, because there's actually two distinct ways to pronounce it)? Yeah, that's pretty much one of the rarest phonemes on the planet. It's in English, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Swahili, and *nothing* else of note (no, Arapaho is not notable). That's why so many foreigners can't pronounce "th" properly - it doesn't exist in their language.
My vote for lingua franca? Esperanto. That's literally what it was designed for.
It's very orthogonal - that massive list at the start of "how to convert a noun from singular to plural" is just one rule: add a -j. That's it. Auto becomes autoj. Kapo becomes kapoj. Letters are pronounced only one way.
It's not perfectly culture-neutral, but it at least makes a significant effort. It's already widely-spoken enough to have an "installed base", unlike most other invented languages (I'm looking at you, Lojban!)
And it's Indo-european enough that anyone who knows English, German, French, Russian, or any of those other related languages, will be able to sort-of understand you. Not perfectly, not even half the full meaning will get through, but if I say "mia komputilo estas rompita", you should be able to guess at least "my computer is ____", and hopefully the blue smoke leaking out will tell you the rest.
Because they couldn't figure out how to get MSSQL working, they couldn't afford Oracle, the very thought of "open source" scared the crap out of them (so no MySQL/PostgreSQL), and all the other proprietary databases are (apparently) even worse than Access.
Weird, I'm able to pronounce it just fine (I'm mis-using the ' as "extremely short nonspecific vowel", not "glottal stop"; while technically incorrect, this matches common usage, which seems to be increasingly popular (again, I'm extrapolating a few centuries out)).
Put it in the crater - underground, actually, dug into the walls of the crater. Gives you better protection from radiation, and helps maintain stable temperatures (not quite needed in a crater that's always in darkness, though).
I remember reading up on Shackleton Crater a while back, when I was trying to write a sci-fi story (it never really got anywhere - sorry!). I needed a name for the main character, most surnames are based on either location or occupation. At the time of the story, humanity is just beginning to spread beyond the solar system, so the Moon's been inhabited for quite some time. Thus: Captain Ran fr'Shackleton (I'm also a bit of a Tolkien fan, so I tried to think about how the language will change over the next few centuries - we seem to like shortening things, so I cut a syllable out of the common cognomen "Ryan" and abbreviated "from").
Anyways...
We've long suspected that there was ice there, and several other factors made this a quite good location for a moonbase (good terrain, relatively well-explored, and a crater in general is a good idea because it will help protect against radiation). If it really does have that much ice, it might actually go from "theoretically possible" to "economically feasible" to build a moonbase.
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That's because on most other sites, they don't know "queue" is actually a word.
Okay, so the immigrant workers are going to carry their papers. And many of the illegal ones, or at least the smart ones, will carry forged papers - at least ones good enough to pass cursory inspection.
But what about the native-born citizens? Not everyone has a driver's license (or an Arizona license - would my Virginia driver's license count as "proof of citizenship"?), and I highly doubt citizens will be carrying around their birth certificates or anything - after all, they're not immigrants, why should they be concerned about an immigration law.
This is basically carte blanche for the police to harass anyone, and non-immigrants are going to be surprisingly affected.
In any case, I'm now mentally filing "Arizona" next to "East Germany", because both require me to have my papers in ordnung (and because both are effectively in the past - E.G. literally, Arizona figuratively).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we formally declare war in Korea?
Twenty? I used a one-button Mac six years ago - one of those ugly uncomfortable puck mice. It was made maybe ten years ago, probably a bit less.
Not to mention that *technically* their current touchpad mice have only one "button"...
Not good with sarcasm?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sarcasm
This isn't a courtroom. We don't need "beyond a reasonable doubt".
We have no other reasonable suspects. We have *some* evidence supporting the US/Israel hypothesis. We have motive. We have a lack of denial from the accused.
None of those alone is "proof". Even altogether, it's not "proof", but this is the Court of Public Opinion, not the International Court of Justice.
A lumberjack gap?
I'm OK with this.
1) There is no DDR5. There's GDDR5, which is essentially DDR3 optimized for parallel access (graphics cards manufacturers got into a bit of an "our numbers are bigger than their numbers" war a while back).
2) GPU stream processors are *terrible* for database work, and the latency of using GPU memory from the CPU would ruin any advantage GDDR5 memory has.
3) The 4GB cards are, coincidentally, the most expensive ones. I'm talking bare minimum $200-$300.
Yeah. You're better off just stuffing a box full of high-performance DDR3.
I was referring to software-based ramdisks, not RAM-based SSDs. Although I suppose there's not much of a performance difference - the only difference is durability.
Ah, but it's an "enterprise-grade" toy.
It's a bit more complex. There's four main ways to do MySQL storage in RAM (which I know of because my current work project is a MySQL application).
First, the NDB Cluster system is there, which is what you've mentioned. That's basically just a MySQL frontend to a distributed, memory-based NoSQL database, though. Convenient, but not truly "MySQL".
The second is using the "Memory" storage engine, where it actually stores a normal MyISAM table in memory. However, this is a surprisingly crappy option, because it uses table-level locks for writing, so parallel write performance is only marginally faster than disk.
The third is to store regular InnoDB tables on a ramdisk. This can be crazy fast, but it also means that if your server crashes or loses power, you're *fucked*
The fourth is to use Memcached, which isn't really a MySQL thing at all. You're basically just caching data in a memory-only NoSQL database, at the application level. This is actually what we ended up doing, because all the others are pretty crappy options - Cluster is the best one, but the hardware requirements are higher than we could justify spending given our performance requirements. Shoving memcached onto the web server (which has RAM to spare) and setting certain queries to cache their results there sped things up significantly, at minimal cost.
As far as I can tell from the summary (I refuse to read the articles for such a blantant slashvertisement), this "MemSQL" doesn't do anything you can't do by configuring MySQL properly, although they likely optimized some rarely-used modules to make them faster.
"Apparently an Apple employee heard her speaking Farsi. As he was also of Iranian extraction he recognized the language and used this as a basis for refusal."
So this isn't just another case of "racist white guy does something stupid to someone just because they're Middle Eastern*", this is "racist Middle Eastern guy does something stupid to someone just because they're Middle Eastern"
That's... wow. I was not prepared for this level of stupid today.
* Is is really correct to consider Iran "Middle Eastern"? I know they're ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Arabs, and also have a significant religious difference. But geographically (and geo-politically, at least from an American view), you could definitely argue that they are.
They quite possibly *don't*.
Prohibiting people from installing software means they don't trust them to administer their own machines. Which I can actually understand in many situations - do you know how many relatives' computers I've had to fix because they installed some malware or crap?
Prohibiting people from using USB drives means they don't trust them with their own data - worried about data leaks. That's far less common (and far less excusable - unless he's working with *extremely* sensitive data, you need to just trust your employees to do their job right (and pay them enough that they want to)).
Back in school, I put my stuff on a small USB flash drive (at first a 256MB, later a 4GB - both cost about $20 when I got them). For me, it was CodeBlocks, because my personal coding project was in C++, but I imagine you can do the same with nearly any open-source IDE and compiler/interpreter.
Depends. Early Jack Ryan, or crazy-nutso hardline-conservative Jack Ryan, from when Clancy went off his meds?
I used to be a big Clancy reader, but I haven't really kept up. I read the newest one a few months ago, and I was shocked at how much he'd turned it into his own political fantasy. He (or his ghostwriters) pack it with strawmen and the "good guys" are just *loved* by *everyone* who isn't one of those strawmen.
Let's just look at the story. Spoiler alerts, obviously.
A terrorist leader who is /totally/ not Bin Laden gets captured by an illegal, unofficial special forces group (which is a whole rant in itself) and basically dropped off in front of a US jail, Batman-style. The astoundingly stupid President makes a big show out of giving him a trial; his defense attorney is an ACLU hippie woman (whose breasts Clancy devotes a few too many sentences to), and even then this entire subplot is being orchestrated by an ex-Soviet still-Communist media mogul. Jack Ryan, running to be the second president to serve non-consecutive terms, makes it a major campaign issue that he will not give not-Laden an open trial, getting a standing ovation after declaring in a debate that his first act as President would be to ship him off to Gitmo for a secret military trial.
Meanwhile, Ryan's son is off being part of the aforementioned spec-ops group, which operates not just beyond international law, but actually completely without the knowledge or even authorization of the current US government. Let me say that again - a secret group of heavily-armed people who operate completely alone, their only connection to any sort of authority being the bank safe full of blank (but signed) presidential pardons, who fund themselves by tapping into the CIANSA data link and using the data for insider trading, and whose goals are to kill any terrorist threat to America, again, without *any* sort of oversight.
Anyways, Junior's subplot is mainly about a rogue Pakistani general's plot to steal his own country's nuclear weapons and give them to Islamic terrorists in Unpronouncablistan - and *their* plan is to mount them on hijacked space rockets to launch at Moscow. Junior, and his fellow assassins, do this by eventually *invading* Pakistan, with running gun battles through the streets that fit Call of Duty better than Rainbow Six. Oh, and Rainbow does show up again, only to be completely incompetent because international bureaucracy fucks EVERYTHING up. That's almost an exact quote, by the way.
The C-plot is something about Clark tracking down who's behind the A-plot (spoiler: the filthy commie goes to jail too), with the obligatory East Germany/Soviet Russia backstory. Not really anything to it.
There are random asides about irrelevant-to-the-story-but-political-hot-topics like health care (apparently socialized health care is *terrible*, and without CAPITALISM to drive them, doctors just don't give a shit and get drunk during surgeries). That's not even relevant to some D-plot, that's just random pages of POLITICS crammed in there for no good reason.
So yeah. The only good thing I can say is that the actual prose is as good as it ever was - the details of the story are great, the action scenes are actiony, the dialog is good, but the Rand-esque political monologues and overall plot are pretty grating.
I'm not sure if I just didn't really pay much attention to it when I read his books earlier, or if Clancy (or, again, his co-authors) are just nuts.
I think you don't quite know what orthogonal means. Or perhaps it is I who misused it - what I meant was that it is a regular language that tries to follow the "principle of least astonishment".
Esperanto is actually pretty good at being flexible. For example, word order is "whatever the hell you want". Subject-Verb-Object? Fine! Subject-Object-Verb? You bet! Verb-Object-Subject? Why not! You want to put the adjectives next to the opposite nouns from the ones they describe? Perfectly valid, and probably actually useful for some nice wordplay.
In most languages, when a word is taken from another language, it's modified to fit their own grammar and phonology. If I decided Esperanto really needed the word santorum (the noun, not the proper noun), I would modify it so the rules of Esperanto apply (in this case, it would become santoro (santoron in the accusative, santoroj and santorojn in the plural, although I suspect the word is already in use).
English, in a truly out-of-character show of cultural sensitivity, tends to keep the rules of the original language. Which is a problem when you steal (excuse me, *pirate*) words from as many languages as English. So if I decide to import a word from Esperanto that has no English equivalent, I would keep the rules of the original language. Only thing I would probably do is make the spelling fit the pronunciation (ie. santoroy or santoroi, to re-use an example).
Writing drivers is not free. It costs money to hire and pay a development team.
AMD/nVidia would love it if everyone used one version of Windows (even Windows has driver compatibility problems between versions - Vista/7 drivers don't always work on XP/2K, and never on 95/98/ME, and so on). Not to mention 32-bit/64-bit drivers. They would cut their driver development costs dramatically.
On the other hand, users would love it if they supported every single revision of even the most niche OS, from Mac OS 9 to Minix to freaking CP/M.
Obviously, neither extreme is actually viable. At the very least, they'll need to support four Windows drivers (32/64-bit XP and Vista/7, probably going to become Vista/7 and 8 soon), and OS X, if only because between those two you get > 95% of the desktop market (and Apple's willing to subsidize your dev costs because they need it to sell their hardware).
Linux support is iffy because it's just on the border of "is it worth our money to make drivers for this OS?". It's big enough that you'll get *some* sales, but not enough to justify the kind of development work that goes into the Windows drivers. So it seems most companies are content to half-ass it to hedge their bets - if the Year of Linux on the Desktop finally arrives, they can quickly ramp up development and ship out awesome, Grade-A drivers, but if Linux on the desktop totally dies (at least to the level of *BSD), they didn't waste much money.
That also explains, to an extent, why Intel's Linux drivers rock. Intel graphics are found much more often on servers and ultra-portable laptops than AMD/nVidia's graphics. And, coincidentally, Linux dominates the server market, and is making inroads on netbooks and such. So Intel gets much more out of having good Linux drivers (it also helps that to Intel, GPUs are a product bundled with their actual money-maker, while to nVidia GPUs *are* their money-maker).
Standard? Not quite. But there are three different methods, all based around replacing non-ASCII characters with a sequence of two ASCII characters. And each of them is common enough that you'll see them in use.
My own preference is for the use of the caret: ie. rego (with a circumflex over the G that I know /. won't parse) becomes reg^o.
Other systems use H (regho) or X (regxo) for the same purpose. H has the problem of being ambiguous as to whether it's an actual H, or if it's a diacritic replacement. X is not (X is not a letter in Esperanto) but it doesn't quite look as good.
English is the exact opposite of "orthogonal". Nothing makes sense.
Let's just look at the rules for taking a singular noun, and making it plural (paraphrased from Wikipedia's article):
1. If the noun ends in a sibilant consonant sound, suffix -es
1a. unless it ended with a silent E, in which case merely suffix an -s and pronounce the E
2. If it ends with a non-sibilant unvoiced consonant, suffix -s
3. For all others, suffix -s, but pronounce it as -z
3a. Unless it ended with -o, in which case suffix -es and pronounce as an S (provided it is not a loanword from Italian)
3b. Unless it ended with -y, in which case replace with -ies (but ONLY if there is not a vowel before the Y)
3c. Unless the last consonant was an unvoiced fricative, in which case replace with a voiced fricative. Whether or not you should change the spelling varies by word
3d. Unless it is one of the special words that do not change at all between singular and plural
3e. Unless it is one of several Old English words that are suffixed with -en, often changing other parts (ie. brother -> brethren)
3f. Unless it is one of several other Old English words that change certain vowels (ie. foot -> feet)
3g. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -a, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ae
3h. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -us, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -i
3i. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -um, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -a
3j. Unless it is derived from Latin and ends in -[i|e]x, in which case follow the Latin rules and replace with -ices
3k: Unless it is derived from Greek and ends in -on, in which case follow the Greek rules and replace with -a
3l: Unless it is one of certain words from Hebrew, in which case suffix -im or -ot as appropriate
3m: Unless it is one of other certain exceptions that occur for only one or two words.
Got it?
Now try to list every possible way to pronounce "gh" in a word. You *will* miss some.
Now realize that you have to learn the entire nominative/accusative system common to European languages *just* for a handful of pronouns (see: I vs. Me, We vs. Us). At least in most languages that do that, it applies everywhere.
Yeah, English follows the philosophy of "rules are meant to be broken". *Every* rule has at least one exception. Like how adjectives normally come before the noun, except in weird structures like "notary public".
There's even more things. You know that "th" sound (or rather, sounds, because there's actually two distinct ways to pronounce it)? Yeah, that's pretty much one of the rarest phonemes on the planet. It's in English, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Swahili, and *nothing* else of note (no, Arapaho is not notable). That's why so many foreigners can't pronounce "th" properly - it doesn't exist in their language.
My vote for lingua franca? Esperanto. That's literally what it was designed for.
It's very orthogonal - that massive list at the start of "how to convert a noun from singular to plural" is just one rule: add a -j. That's it. Auto becomes autoj. Kapo becomes kapoj. Letters are pronounced only one way.
It's not perfectly culture-neutral, but it at least makes a significant effort. It's already widely-spoken enough to have an "installed base", unlike most other invented languages (I'm looking at you, Lojban!)
And it's Indo-european enough that anyone who knows English, German, French, Russian, or any of those other related languages, will be able to sort-of understand you. Not perfectly, not even half the full meaning will get through, but if I say "mia komputilo estas rompita", you should be able to guess at least "my computer is ____", and hopefully the blue smoke leaking out will tell you the rest.
Because they couldn't figure out how to get MSSQL working, they couldn't afford Oracle, the very thought of "open source" scared the crap out of them (so no MySQL/PostgreSQL), and all the other proprietary databases are (apparently) even worse than Access.
I thought our standard unit was Libraries of Congress?
Weird, I'm able to pronounce it just fine (I'm mis-using the ' as "extremely short nonspecific vowel", not "glottal stop"; while technically incorrect, this matches common usage, which seems to be increasingly popular (again, I'm extrapolating a few centuries out)).
Put it in the crater - underground, actually, dug into the walls of the crater. Gives you better protection from radiation, and helps maintain stable temperatures (not quite needed in a crater that's always in darkness, though).
I remember reading up on Shackleton Crater a while back, when I was trying to write a sci-fi story (it never really got anywhere - sorry!). I needed a name for the main character, most surnames are based on either location or occupation. At the time of the story, humanity is just beginning to spread beyond the solar system, so the Moon's been inhabited for quite some time. Thus: Captain Ran fr'Shackleton (I'm also a bit of a Tolkien fan, so I tried to think about how the language will change over the next few centuries - we seem to like shortening things, so I cut a syllable out of the common cognomen "Ryan" and abbreviated "from").
Anyways...
We've long suspected that there was ice there, and several other factors made this a quite good location for a moonbase (good terrain, relatively well-explored, and a crater in general is a good idea because it will help protect against radiation). If it really does have that much ice, it might actually go from "theoretically possible" to "economically feasible" to build a moonbase.