buckminster

As you pointed out yourself [1], the iceberg is causing problems already by melting into the local ecosystem. A radioactive iceberg melting into the local ecosystem seems likely to be worse.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25495063

> running a user space program inside the kernel

Isn't it actually running a user program in kernel space?

Oh God yes! You get an obscure syntax error and it really isn't obvious what the problem is. It would be useful if syntax highlighting marked smart quotes (outside of strings) with a bright red background or something.

Inkscape includes the border width in the displayed object size and position. So an SVG file with a 100 units square and a 1 unit border will be a 101 units square in Inkscape. And if you change the stroke width the object size changes. This causes the coordinate mangling you saw.

Consequently, I find it impossible to do precise CAD style diagrams in Inkscape. Of course, it's not designed for that.

This is much better than it used to be. Back in the 80s we had an 8-bit computer and a 50s vacuum cleaner. Using the cleaner anywhere in the house would corrupt the computer's memory.

Yes, but it's easy to generate a valid pdf. You just include the features you need and ignore the rest. It's really hard to transform an arbitrary pdf because you need to handle all the features.

Without further information this is more likely to be an Apple bug because they are doing the harder job.

There is absolutely no way that China, India, Brazil, etc. are going to limit their growth before their population's standard of living matches ours. Reducing our consumption is a prerequisite for capping their consumption at a sustainable level. Of course, even if we do that nothing is guaranteed.

Average testicle size has been shrinking for decades too. And as you say, nobody knows why.

This is half true. When I was an employee I viewed the chain of command as existing for my benefit, not my manager's. If some random bigwig wanted me to do something for them I would direct them to my manager. It wasn't my job to arbitrate between differing management demands on my time.

Writing a letter yourself works. In my experience in the UK anyway.

In the past I've had disputes where I've made tens of phone calls to customer support people who cannot solve the problem but pretend they will. Every call is groundhog day.

Now, if the problem isn't solved by the first phone call I write a letter.

A short paragraph (one or two sentences) describing what happened and why it is a problem. A short paragraph describing what I want. Then all the tedious detail. And conclude by restating the problem and what I want. No threats.

It hasn't failed yet.

Suppose the government wants to know what a particular user was reading on your site. They can calculate the hashed ID for that user and then serve a warrant requesting the data for that ID.

Obfuscation of the ID doesn't help.

I don't want to detract from your comment, but it wasn't BP, it was Standard Oil, General Motors and DuPont.

This is pedantically true, but the TOS are usually bundled with other agreements that purport to give the company permission to do things.

Overspray from something else on the plate would have been obvious. Maybe it was overspray from someone else's plate.

But after a few days in America I wasn't that surprised. It was just another thing with added sugar for no reason.

Try making crepes with the bacon grease. They are divine.

Sure, you can find this flavour combination anywhere, but I don't know of another country that uses sugar to the extent America does. I ordered a fried breakfast in an American hotel and they put icing sugar on the sausages! It's bizarre.

It's possible that smart managers will prefer people who get their work done while minimising these metrics.

I can dream.

I bought a kindle. It didn't have ads. I did a factory reset. Now it does. This is the first time I've heard about a choice.

Nagle says yes, but he'd get rid of delayed ACK:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050645

The vowel! Yes, they are the same.

They are shown with different pronunciations. Do you mean the recordings? They sound different to my British ear.

I understand perfectly well that if it goes wrong I will, most likely, be able to unpick the damage. But I also understand that this can take years and lots of money. Especially if the signature service is in a different country. So-called identity theft is a real problem.

My particular concern is that I believe I'm entering into a tenancy but then discover, due to some bug in the software, that the landlord never actually entered the agreement. At this point the landlord can legally evict me if, say, he gets a better offer. What can I do about this?

Edit to explain a detail of English law: this is a lease renewal. It isn't necessary for my continued occupation, but without it I have no security of tenure.

These signature services make no sense. My UK estate agent is trying to get me to use an American signature service to renew my lease.

- What I get is an email from a third party (the signature service) with whom I have no business relationship. Why would I trust anything they say?

- How do I know the agent has signed the lease?

- What can I do if the American service claims I signed a contract when I didn't? If I sign even a single contract with them I'm effectively giving them power of attorney to accept any contract on my behalf.

- Anyone who gains access to my email can enter contracts on my behalf.

It's mad.

The point of signing a contract in each other's presence is that both parties understand they are agreeing to something, and both have no doubt that the other is also entering the agreement. Online signature services do not achieve this.

And finally, PKI is worse. I won't rehearse the arguments. Read Ross Anderson.

Me too! After nearly 40 years of programming, though not all of it professional. It was worth it just for the improvements to my posture.

I can't imagine why anyone would do this either. I suppose one possibility is that some software in their web stack is converting fi to an explicit fi ligature and the monospaced font chosen by the web page doesn't support it so the browser does a substitution. When I spot another one I'll have to dig more deeply.

I'm not a fan of symbol ligatures but what I really loathe are monospaced fonts with a single character width fi ligature so the f and the i are both half width. I've seen several websites recently using fonts that do this. It is very visually distracting, especially in code samples.

I agree. Additionally, regular limited liability corporations should be prohibited from serving this market. Only allow unlimited liability partnerships to do so. If you want to work outside of the usual legal protections then you have to own it.

Why worry about the dictionaries? No legitimate user will accidentally enter a Greek Alpha rather than an A, for example. If a malicious user does this it won't resolve anyway because the domain is banned by the rules and can't be registered.

Yes, that's the default stub or you can use the linker's "/STUB" flag to specify alternative DOS code to link into your windows exe.

Sorry, you're right. fsync will report failure nowadays so you're not getting silent corruption.

A different failure mode: the drive reorders writes and doesn't respect flush commands.

Edit: of course, you can't avoid the problem by changing the way you write the file. Files stored locally are inherently fragile.