There's a saying "Locks are to keep out honest people". That's basically it with suitcase locks. To keep your kids from playing with your stuff or your friends who might accidentally open the wrong one.
The UAE really does have a low crime rate. The people being disappeared, flogged, etc are typically breaking the law. We in the west might not agree with those laws, but they're still written laws that you can simply avoid breaking to keep yourself safe.
The same goes in any country. They all have different laws. You can be convicted for buying counterfeit clothes in Italy, Having sex with a 17 year old in the US (despite it being legal in the UK), Possessing certain types of hand-drawn pornography in Australia (despite it being legal in the US), Posting threatening messages on Facebook in the US, downloading music from the internet in the US.
Anyone who needs to distinguish 20 shades of green would develop the ability to do so. That's more culture or experience than language. Having names for them just means they have some need to communicate that information. You could do the same in English by drawing words or codes from color lists like websafe, Pantone, etc.
An example where language forces our thinking and even actions instead of simply allowing us to express it easily is plurals. Plurals force us to include unneeded number information in a lot of our thinking and talking. We have to have at least 2 cars to say "I have some cars" when showing off, otherwise admit that we only have one. You can see it in writing that uses "I" or "we" too. It reveals how many people it represents. A 2-person company can look much bigger than a 1-person company because it can use "we", "our", etc. just the same as a 1000000 person company does.
Many of the examples tend to be about very hard to grasp concepts in the first place, specifically emotions. Maybe those ideas are so close to the line between important and unimportant that it's no great gain or loss if a few slip over the line one way or the other.
A lot of disagreement on this but it's basically true. Homeowners want to protect their investment and their comfortable lifestyle so they make sure local government restricts others from diluting what they have. If more houses could be built on the same sized sections, then poorer people would move in because they'd be cheaper. Poor people tend to be more of a disturbance to their neighbors so that would make the incumbents lose what they paid for when they bought their high priced properties in peaceful suburbia. Same goes for hotels which attract transient people that the existing property owners want to keep away.
This happens on many scales. We don't want poor strangers living in our bedroom, on our lawn, in our suburb or in our country. So we have trespass laws, zoning and immigration restrictions to protect us from them.
You can't say the clouds aren't moving because no instrument is sensitive enough to be sure there's exactly zero movement. All you can say is they're moving slower than some maximum speed. You could estimate that maximum speed from the pixel size and duration of the animation. Then your statement would be "the clouds are moving slower than X m/s which is too slow for real clouds.". That's then quite a sensible criticism of a suspected faked video. But "they're not moving" is nearly meaningless.
For all the complaints, this sounds like a great deal for the Gtk developers. They don't have to plan ahead of time which version is going to be the stable one. If one ends up working well and they want to start on new ideas, they can just leave it unchanged, declare it to be the stable one and move on. Developers are people too and they would want a system that makes it easy for them.
Is it really a problem for application developers either? When you start your project, just pick the latest stable version and stay with that throughout. You can ignore all the subsequent updates and be sure that your stable version's API won't change.
The unstable versions are surely just for people who want to play with the new features early, not people who are worried about compatibility.
About half of UK WWI soldiers were volunteers. They threw themselves into the meat grinder. Even conscripted people could appeal for being a conscientious objector.
All finite element analysis software uses "bad algorithms" in the sense that they give wrong results if the user doesn't take their limitations into account. A common type of error causes them to underestimate stress at the highest stress locations - where failure is most likely! Other problems occur with structures that stiffen as they're loaded. That effect is ignored by linear analysis and engineers often don't do the more accurate non-linear analysis because it cost more time (computer resources) and money (more expensive licenses) as well as sometimes just being more difficult to set up. It's more that the technology isn't advanced enough to be foolproof than that there are bugs.
There's a science reason for denying participants access to their own data. For example, if you suspect you might have some brain anomaly, you might enroll in the study as a healthy person hoping to use it as a free way to get a brain scan. People doing that would distort the sampling.
Perhaps the world would be a less violent place if we laughed at soldiers for their failures instead of glorifying them. The article fittingly ends with "all that suffering .. for what?" It really was a lot of murderous people getting themselves killed and injured while trying to kill other people. Not something to have sympathy for. Sure, they might have been fooled by naive ideas of nationalism, but that's still a problem today - people who are so patriotic they'll kill others and risk their lives for no real reason other than "my country is better than yours"
Costing more money is a measure of how many resources it's using. So more expensive is almost by definition more wasteful. The resource might be more human labor than natural resources but it's still something valuable that could better be used another way if there's a cheaper alternative.
If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now slightly further into the desert/salt flats/etc than before?
It seems to be that way. Weren't the Nuremberg trials supposed to have established the idea the soldiers, or at least officers passing orders along can be guilty even if they're following orders? I suppose those were for more clear cut war crimes and the Iraq soldiers were mostly quite removed from the actual killing they triggered.
It's also responsible for the destruction of Iraq and the emergence of ISIS. Are you really proud that your personal success rides on the back of so many innocent lives being lost?