Dinoguy1000

http://xkcd.com/678/ sounds like what you're thinking of. ;)

I think we finally know the real purpose behind the Dead Space Markers...

Now it does. ;)

No comment on the overall story, but as soon as I heard the description of the man carrying her, and he said "I'm her husband", my thought was Izumi Curtis and her husband Sig. =D

Ooh, sorry about that then. I'll definitely keep that in mind in the future. =D

Deleted pages are never truly deleted. A more accurate description would be "hidden", and there are different levels to which a page can be hidden:

* Blanking a page, or part of a page, is an action that any editor can perform, and any editor can undo. This hides content from the "live" page, but anyone can view the blanked content by looking in the page's history. * Deleting a page is an action limited to administrators, and similarly, only an admin can undelete a page. A deleted page is basically treated by MediaWiki like it doesn't exist, and only admins can view the deleted content. Individual edits can also be deleted, but this is not as common. * Lastly, oversighting can be used to hide content from even admins. Admins can oversight stuff as well, and in these cases, the oversighted content can be viewed by other admins, though it requires more work than viewing deleted stuff. For oversighted content to be hidden even from admins, the oversighting must be done by another user group called (aptly enough) oversighters. In the context of WMF project, entry to this usergroup is tightly controlled (seriously, it makes the request for adminship process look like an open door), and anyone selected for the role must personally confirm their identity to the WMF.

The main point is that, in all of these cases, the content is never gone, but simply hidden; the MediaWiki software is designed so that every action is logged and can be reversed.

The video description on YouTube says it's arthrogryposis.

It falls back to current behavior of just having the headlights on in the case of an error like that. There was another article on these a week or two ago on a different website that specifically mentioned something like that.

It's a little more complicated than that, actually. Any given application of a file format may use various obfuscation techniques on the file's header or contents that render the file invalid from the perspective of the published standard (if there is one; it is also common in these cases to change the file extension to further disguise what format the file actually uses). Programs that do this may or may not de-obfuscate the file prior to use, depending largely on how and why the file was obfuscated.

For instance, a common obfuscation method is simply removing the magic number from the file; in this case, the program may simply try to use the file as the given format and return an error (or crash; we are talking largely about proprietary software in these cases after all) if the file can't be read.

When a file format starts at offset 0, it simply means that it starts at the first byte of the file.

Other than that, I can't provide any information on file formats allowed to start at offsets other than 0, or why this may or may not be a good idea (I suppose maybe it would allow an enterprising programmer to hide a malicious file by embedding it in an otherwise-innocuous format?), though I am certainly curious as well.

What's with the downvote? I was being sarcastic. =/

I really like the correction at the end of the article:

> Due to a typo, this article originally said that a 300 terabyte hard drive sells for about $350.

300 terabytes for $350? In one drive? Sign me up. =D

Personally, I believe that any system allowing for indefinite copyright protection (even a system like the current one, that involves constantly changing the system to extend protection) is harmful in the long run, but your compromise is definitely far superior to the status quo, and would probably make for a pretty good bridge from now to future, far more sane copyright law.

See http://futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2019.htm#copyright . I have no doubt that when 2019 rolls around, if Disney et al. (I mention Disney specifically instead of the RIAA or anyone else because Disney seems to be the one really at the forefront of the copyright extension issue every time it comes up) are still around in any significant form (hopefully they'll have been thoroughly disrupted years before then, but you can't really predict the future, etc. etc.), they'll be pushing for another extension to copyright terms. However, there's no guarantee that said push would make it through Congress, especially given recent victories over legislation such as SOPA/PIPA and efforts to disrupt the industry. The website presents its predictions in light of current laws and trends, since anything else would end up being too complicated from all the possible "what-if" alternate timelines.

TrID[1] has a number of definitions for various executable files, but it's designed for general-purpose file format identification. PEiD[2] is built specifically for identifying packers, compilers, etc. for PE files, and should therefore be able to identify a far wider array of them (the site claims it detects over 600 PE signatures), but I've never done any checking myself, and the project unfortunately seems to be discontinued.

[1] http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html [2] http://www.peid.info/

It's important to keep in mind, though, that this article (and its follow-ups) is written almost entirely from the perspective of the Japanese industry, not the American one. I'm not saying there would be no benefit to disrupting this industry, or that there are no reasons to do so, but even once you get past the inherent differences in business models etc., you still need to keep in mind that this industry is far more lenient towards piracy than Hollywood, and the American[1] anime licensing industry even more yet: for decades (throughout the 80s, 90s, and a good part of the 00s), American licensors basically turned a blind eye towards piracy, and the Japanese studios largely didn't seem to care about Americans pirating their stuff. Even when the companies started taking action, though, in the American companies' case, it started out with earnestly and politely asking people to stop pirating licensed series (and, surprise surprise, it did work - as it turns out, if you treat people with respect when you ask them to stop doing something, they're far less likely to hate you for it[2]). DMCA takedown notices have only been used as a last resort, and to my knowledge, no one has been taken to court over anime piracy (and certainly not random unemployed teenagers being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars).

[1] I talk about the American licensors, industry, and fanbase here, but much of what I say is more-or-less directly applicable to the same in other countries, as well.

[2] Just so we're clear, I'm being sarcastic here. There's absolutely no reason to believe that if you treat someone with respect, they're going to turn around and hate you for it. There are cases where this happens, of course (and this response may be more or less likely then normal depending on the nature and reasons for your interactions with them), but it's by far the exception.

Am I really the only one who started reading this thinking the author was going to discuss the paper's claim that dinosaurs, in popular perception, have a lizardlike/reptilian, splayed stance? I've been a dinosaur nerd for years, and the only times I've heard anything about such a possibility is in discussions of old perceptions of dinosaur posture - in every modern reference (intellectual discussion or pop culture appearance) I've seen, dinosaurs are always portrayed with nothing other than a mammalian stance.

Depending where in the US you look, the price of gas has done anything from less than doubling to increasing more than five-fold over the past decade.* It's not $8/gallon, but there are definitely places where you'd have to pay $4-6 per gallon, and it's only becoming more widespread. If there's one thing US citizens have shown, though, it's that they're perfectly willing to continue shelling out more and more money to drive ridiculously inefficient vehicles, even while they grumble about the spiraling price and (depending where you look) speak of mythical, massive reserves of oil the US supposedly has that could last the US anywhere from decades to centuries, depending who you ask.

Simply adding more costs onto gas is going to do nothing more to change what the average US citizen drives then what the past decade of price increases have.

* This is based on anecdote and recollection; I don't have any sources to back it up, but if it's wrong one way or the other, more than likely it's conservative.

We had decentralized web standards in the past, with browser vendors implementing new markup features on their (and, to a lesser extent, their users') whims rather than marching in lockstep with some "central governance" - the First Browser War, where Microsoft and Netscape were slinging it out for market dominance, adding new features as quickly as possible to gain more users and simultaneously create a captive market by way of incompatible markup. Yes, this gave us Javascript (if I understand my history correctly), but it also gave us such abominations as the "marquee" and "blink" tags, and no one who worked through those times as a web developer looks back on them fondly.

I am not saying the current situation is ideal, but it is better by leaps and bounds than what it used to be, and what you are proposing.

Disclaimer: I'm not the one who came up with the concept in this particular case, though I did refine the idea.

No, that's specificity (an entirely different beast, and one that can be considerably harder to work with). Inheritance would be styles for a P tag applying to a child I tag.

To be sure, I wasn't suggesting the problem hadn't been practically solved, and I understand quite well that beyond a certain point, there's very little incentive in improving the solution any further.

In retrospect, I probably should have kept my thoughts to myself, and I probably deserve the downvote or two that I got for not doing so. =)

If I'm understanding the relevant WP articles correctly, the travelling salesman problem is not solved, since a solution for it would also imply a solution for all NP-complete problems. What these companies have therefore cannot be an absolute solution, but rather an optimal approximation which may or may not (but probably isn't, and probably can't be proved to be in polynomial time) equal to the absolute solution.

Of course, I don't have much firsthand knowledge of computational complexity myself, so someone else who know better should call me on any nonsense above. =D

Your first example is a little dated; Wikipedia hasn't had one article per Pokemon since around 2007, at the latest, when they were all merged into a handful of lists. Since then, a small number have been spun back out into articles on individual species or evolutionary lines, but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability.

Let me point out now that this is definitely not actually definitive; it by far mostly covers archive formats and compression/encryption. It also hasn't been touched in years. On the other hand, it's on a publicly-editable wiki, so if anyone has ideas for improvements or new info, go for it. =)

There are no general spellcheck bots (I would say there are none, but it's possible there are some that spellcheck within a very clearly defined area, under very specific circumstances). Spellcheck bots are actually a fairly frequent request, and are always refused.

This was covered years ago in an episode of CSI: Miami, believe it or not (I don't remember too much else of the plot, though - something about an exploding manila envelope, IIRC).