[missblit]

> I sometimes wonder how many of its 149,813 ‘characters’ any one human is likely to use, and suspect for most that’s in the low hundreds or less.

Chinese sends it's regards.

But also text interchange is useful even if most people only use a fraction of it most of the time. How else is an English document supposed to quote Chinese characters for instance (this happens all the time on wikipedia pages which share the original name of something next to the translation).

The days before unicode were dark days, nowadays besides the ocassional oddity text pretty much just works without users thinking about it -- thanks to unicode.