eponeponepon

If you just want a text substitution utility, then this is proof that you can implement that by using sed in a controlled manner. Why bemoan something for doing more things than you need it to right now? This is what general-purpose computing is all about.

It's more than worth it. It's a story that should be required reading for the modern age.

    unless wood and white is now 
    reserved for Apple... 

I wouldn't put it past them to try...

Always been Army ration pack Biscuits Brown to me.

...to be clear, I kinda liked those things. Kinda.

He definitely did. He was a keen pipesmoker, and very definitely not a stoner. (edit: I think he even pins it to "a plant of the genus Nicotiana" or words to that effect in the LotR appendices)

Peter Jackson's presentation of it in the movies though... yeah. No ambiguity there. His hobbits were blazed 24/7.

I thought cost was a blocker too till I actually sat down and worked it out. A cheap microserver with about 15TB of disk space came in well under the thousand pound mark - the real blocker is sitting down and actually ripping the things. There's a trade-off between space and encoding quality to be made, but I'm entirely happy with libx265's results at 1080p.

Obviously your mileage may vary as to what's a reasonable cost.

Honestly, this could happen at any company, for all the same reasons - in my experience, any workplace that isn't actually, or at least run as if it were, military is rife with subpar physical security.

And I can't claim not to be part of the problem - I'm forever wandering off to get coffee without locking my screen, holding doors for people I kinda think I might recognise... every security sin you can name, I'm guilty of it at some point. And so are you. Yes, you. No, probably not you, Mr. Schneier.

Comfort is exactly what people seek. You can't make something both comfortable and undesirable.

If you're prepared to countenance a world where all people live a comfortable life, then you're implicitly countenancing a world where all people have equal worth - monetarily and otherwise.

How do you propose that poverty be eliminated without some people holding proportionally less of the world's money?

Yeah, this doesn't really hold water when your software is as widely installed as VLC - I've lost count of the number of deeply nontechnical people I've installed it for, for what that's worth. Checking file sizes is serious half-assing IMO - it's not beyond the wit of teenagers running a botnet to deal with that, never mind determined criminals.

Ah, awesome - Inkscape has got me out of more than a few holes in the past few years, but it's always been juust crashy enough that I haven't truly felt comfortable pushing it at work, so increased stability is definitely welcome! :-)

It's the Unicode coverage that keeps me with DJV Mono - working a lot with document-focused XML, the fewer little white boxes turn up in my editor the better. DJV Sans ended up leaking into my desktop over the years and now I can't imagine going without it.

Good luck taking on a Cambridge college in the courts...

This has a slight air of the manganese nodule seabed mining that was propagated as cover for the Glomar Explorer expedition...

For clarity, the two people arrested were released without charge.

Although not before the press had smeared their names and faces across the whole country.

I kind of struggle to understand how there isn't enough equipment and electrical engineering expertise on site at a modern airport to pinpoint these drones really quickly - especially at Heathrow.

Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?

I don't really understand how the lossy vs lossless argument turned into a chest-beating contest about whose ears are the best.

The point of lossless audio compression is archiving - knowing that you can make a first-generation encoding of the audio you have stored for any new device or format in future.

If you want to listen to your FLAC files, great, you're not losing anything by doing that - just don't try and tell me that it's an aesthetic choice that makes the slightest bit of difference to the experience.

Long-lasting rings would be - fundamentally all you need for a ring to form is some debris and a gravity well.

To be clear, something that "doesn't last long" on an astronomical timescale could still quite happily exist stably for several dozen human lifetimes.

Well, in the other poster's defence, I thought "nothing concrete" covered things well enough, but these quotes from the article seem sanguine about the prospect:

"And we hope to hunt down one more KBO — one more Kuiper Belt object — and make an even more distant flyby in the 2020s," Stern added [...] New Horizons [...] has enough juice [...] to keep the power on through the mid to late 2030s, he said.”

Has there been any talk of further fly-by targets? I seem to recall there were a number of possible candidates after the Pluto fly-by, but I suppose the Thule visit might have ruled some or all of those others out.

I think, if we want to play 'what-about', then it's fair to say that the cost of the New Horizons mission ("approximately $700 million over 15 years", per Wikipedia) is a drop in the ocean compared to the US Dept of Defence's direct spending on the 2003-2010 Iraq war, which was more than $700 billion, which came just as much out of the wallet of the US taxpayer (who is both rich and poor, and separately, both content and suffering), and as a little-known side-effect, killed a bunch more people than New Horizons has so far.

In a lot of ways, science and patience are the same thing.

Not in all ways. But a lot of them.

Be thankful you aren't in a country where three successive governments have been pushing "austerity" for a decade, then.

The current one has even had the temerity lately to outright deny that their public sector cuts, which include policing, are in any way related to the obvious rise in low-level crime and disorder here.

Yeah, the non-emergency number seems to be a placebo to me - I've never heard of anyone getting any results by ringing it. I'm sure things were better when one used to be able to ring the local station direct.

I'm really quite excited about this. I don't know if I'd just completely missed it, or if they it hadn't had much publicity in the mainstream press, but it was a pleasant surprise to read about yesterday!

Well, I suppose it (the security page, that is) could be seen as a nice example of how good net citizenship works in two directions - 1) good people send friendly notifications when they find vulnerabilities, and 2) good people publicly thank people who send them - in that respect I guess it's a page that is of interest to some and may engender interesting discussion.

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone on the net acted this way?

While your fundamental point is very valid, there are plenty of times where a comment to flag up a fine point of your clean and precise code will save future-you hours of head-scratching.

I absolutely do not comment enough, but knowing this, I try to stick to the principle that if I have had to stop and think through an expression before I write it, then I am likely to eventually thank myself for leaving a short explanatory note.

And moreover, it may not be me scratching my head over that nest of ternaries in a year's time - it may be some other poor soul. And while that poor soul won't thank me for leaving a comment, he or she will certainly curse my name - quite possibly vocally and publicly - for not leaving one.

This is all solid advice imho - and a useful digression from the usual accessibility story that just focuses on making content legible to partially sighted people.

The total decoupling of visual presentation from content structure is such an important factor in these matters.

Bent coppers charge a lot. The guy two doors down probably won't stand to lose his job, so will like as not spill the beans for a pint.

    > Why Apple is the only company
      making these is beyond me.

Loosely defined patents and a litigious corporate nature, at a guess.