Yeah, looks like I’d remembered it backwards. It’s still an easily solvable problem by not using a load everything as whatever type you feel like function.

You’re allowed to charge before you give access to the software, but then can’t restrict the people you give it to giving it to more people. The beer licence sounds like those people would be on the hook for beer, too.

no doesn’t become false, it becomes Norway, and when converted to a boolean, Norway is true. The reason’s because one on YAML’s native types is an ISO country code enum, and if you tell a compliant YAML implementation to load a file without giving it a schema, that type has higher priority than string. If you then call a function that converts from native type to string, it expands the country code to the country name, and a function that coerces to boolean makes country codes true. This paragraph was wrong. The other paragraphs are unaffected.

The problem’s easy to avoid, though. You can just specify a schema, or use a function that grabs a string/bool directly instead of going via the assumed type first.

The real problem with YAML is how many implementations are a long way from being conformant, and load things differently to each other, but that situation’s been improving.

It’s generally accepted that file formats aren’t protected IP, so you can write a compatible reader or writer and be in the clear as long as you reused no code from the original reader/writer. The specification may have licence terms that restrict who you can share the spec with, but you don’t necessarily need the official spec to come up with a compatible implementation. Plenty of file formats have been reverse engineered over the years even when the original didn’t have a written spec.

I don’t think bacterial excretions count as farts, so it’s probably more like 800 million years worth of farts as that’s when animals started existing.

I think it’s pretty likely that you’ve seen loads and never known they were different. The difference is small enough that you wouldn’t realise it was significant until you were told:

Pozidriv is intentionally not backwards compatible, and one of the biggest problems it has is looking enough like Phillips that people assume it must be compatible, use a mismatched screw and driver, and strip a head.

Being x86 or not doesn’t have much impact. The CPU instruction set is dealt with by the compiler, and the only differences that show through will be which memory access bugs and race conditions end up having symptoms. The effort comes in because the GPU is programmed completely differently, so a lot of the rendering code needs to be rewritten from scratch, most PCs with good GPUs don’t have unified memory, so you need to manage when things are transferred to the GPU and back, and you’re not targeting one single piece of hardware, but instead many different ones that support different features, perform differently when asked to do the same thing, do different things in cases where the API specification says they can, and do different things when there’s a graphics driver bug.

Things aren’t as complicated as they were when porting things to and from the PS3, which had co-processors that had to be managed separately, or from the Dreamcast, which had a GPU that supported a bunch of things that couldn’t be done on a PC GPU until around 2010. The change wasn’t down to the CPU, and was instead that consoles no longer have weird extra hardware that PCs don’t, so you can typically just try and do the same things in the same ways and it’ll almost always be possible.

In other threads, people have suggested that he might be carrying the manifesto in case he was shot and killed if/when arrested.

They have to defend their trademark. They don’t have to defend copyright, and most of Nintendo’s reputation comes from copyright claims. Someone streaming a let’s play isn’t selling a counterfeit Mario game, they’re just showing you things in a real Mario game, so there’s no trademark claim.

They’re also big abusers of the fact that most of the people they make copyright claims against can’t afford to defend themselves against such a behemoth. Even if you’re sure you’ve not violated their copyright and your lawyer’s sure, too, it’ll be much cheaper to roll over than get the legal system to agree with you.

The intended use for this kind of product is that you hire a company to break into your company, and then tell you how they did it so that criminals (or, if you’re someone like a defence contractor, foreign spies) can’t do the same thing later. Sometimes they’re also used by journalists to prove that the government or a company isn’t taking necessary precautions or by hobbyists at events where everyone’s aware that everyone else will try to break into their stuff. There’s typically vetting of anyone buying non-hobbyist quantities of anything, and it’s all equipment within theoretical reach of organised crime or state actors, so pentesters need to have access, too, or they can’t reasonably assess the real-world threat that’s posed.

Sometimes people write their reasons for doing things down and other people read them and they don’t need to read anyone’s mind to know why they said they did something.

Of course not, but it’s an unrelated not fine to whether or not someone’s a tankie.

That’s not relevant to being a tankie as the US, Israel, and other states backing Israel, aren’t claiming they’re building communism or are the successor state to another which claimed to be building communism. It’s the part where communism is an excuse that means the bad things didn’t really happen and would be fine even if they did that makes tankie-ism its own distinct thing.

They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.

It’s not Kessler Syndrome until it’s so bad that we can’t feasibly launch anything new. A single cascading collision chain might calm down again after breaking a lot of stuff without any catastrophic long term impact if all the debris ends up either in a stable orbit that can be predicted and avoided by other objects, or unstable orbits that decay until the debris falls out of orbit.

As someone who’s just spent half an hour reading Wikipedia thanks to this thread, I can now dispense a summary of what I read to make it feel like I didn’t just waste a chunk of time I should have spent in bed by wasting another chunk of time I should be spending in bed.

Fats are made out of fatty acids, which are carboxylic acids with a longish carbon chain. A saturated fatty acid only has single bonds between carbon atoms, a monounsaturated fatty acid has a single double bond somewhere in the chain (and these are sometimes things that turn into buzzwords, e.g. omega three oils are ones where there’s a single double bond three along from the end of the chain), and a polyunsaturated fatty acid has more than one double bond.

Single bonds in a carbon chain can only be one way around, so you don’t get isomers of saturated fatty acids, but double bonds in a carbon chain can be in either of two orientations. If the hydrogens are on the same side for both sides of the bond, that’s the cis orientation, and if they’re on opposite sides, that’s the trans orientation. Most natural unsaturated fats are cis, so they generally don’t get explicitly labelled as cis fats, and just the trans ones get the extra label. Notably, though, vaccenic acid, which is about 4% of the fat in butter, is trans by default, so it’s cis-vaccenic acid that gets the extra label.

Unsaturated fats tend to be more liquid at room temperature, but can be made by growing cheap vegetables. They also go off faster as free radicals can attack the double bonds. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, but mostly need to come from animals or more expensive plants (palm fat is an exception - it’s cheap and mostly saturated). It’s therefore desirable to use industrial processes to artificially saturate fats, and we can do that by heating them up and exposing them to hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst like Nickel. You don’t necessarily want to fully saturate your fat, though, so might stop part way, and if you do, unless you intentionally tweak the process to avoid it because it’s the 21st century and you’re legally obliged to, you get some of the partially hydrogenated fat switching from cis to trans.

Over the course of the last century, we realised that (except for a few like vaccenic acid) trans fats are harmful in lots of exciting ways, e.g. messing up cholesterol, blocking your arteries, and building up in your brain. They’ve therefore been banned or restricted to certain percentages in a lot of the world. You can get a similar effect by fully hydrogenating things to get safe (or at least safer) saturated fat and mixing it with the unmodified fat, or by switching everything that used to use hydrogenated vegetable oil to using palm oil, which is one of the driving forces behind turning rainforests into palm plantations.

Apparently, this was twenty five minutes of writing, so I’m nearly up to an hour of thinking about fats.

Upstream Firefox doesn’t comply with FDroid’s rules (thanks to the ‘proprietary bits and telemetry’ Handles mentioned), so is only available from the Play Store or as a loose APK that won’t auto-update.

It’s not realistic to demand to own games in the same way as a spoon any time soon. It is, however, pretty reasonable to demand you own games like you’d own a book. You can chop up a book and use it to make a paper maché dog, but you can’t chop up the words within to make a new derivative book (or just copy them as its to get another copy of the same book except for a single backup that you’re not allowed to transfer to someone else unless you also give them the original). The important things you can do with a book but not a game under the current system, even with Gog, are things like selling it on or giving it away when you’re done with it and lending it out like a library.

About a hundred years ago, book publishers tried using licence agreements in books to restrict them in similar ways to how games and other software are restricted today, but courts decided that was completely unreasonable, and put a stop to it. In the US, that’s called the First Sale Doctrine, but it has other names elsewhere or didn’t even need naming. All the arguments that applied to books apply equally well to software, so consumers should demand the same rights.

As a counterpoint, I’ve had Ubuntu’s installer and grub’s updater overwrite and break Windows’ boot files several times, but never had the opposite happen (I’ve had both destroy themselves, though). Thankfully, I know how to rebuild the necessary parts of a Windows install, so it’s never been a catastrophe, but it’s irritating to see what’s always been the source of the problems I’ve had be held up as infallible. Possibly this is a problem unique to Ubuntu - I’m happy to blame Canonical - so maybe it could be entirely sidestepped with other distros.