Posts by KarMann 748 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2018
It's (B) called the Oxford comma, and is a subject of much international & transoceanic debate. This former Yank is all for it, but obviously, given the name (and the assumption it's so-called after the Oxford (rather than some little village in America named after it), which is indeed the case, more directly named for the Oxford University Press, whose editorial style insists on it), you can't blame this one on the Americans.
Also, it saves the trouble for all the other people who didn't know it, some of whom might have looked it up, and others who would have just taken it in stride and continued in ignorance of the phrase. I always figure, whenever there's a question like this in the comments, there's probably at least a few dozen that were wondering the same thing, but either didn't bother to post a comment asking, or saw that there was already an answer, thanks to Korev et al.
That sounds almost like my most glorious contribution to OSS to date. Back in the mid-2000s or so, I was finding that some Perl RPM packages were completely uninstallable (short of --nodeps) because they had some very random-looking requirements that seemed like Perl modules, but weren't. I traced it down to multi-line comments in which one of the lines started with the Perl keyword use, just as part of a sentence, and then the dependency parser assumed the next word was a module name, so you'd end up with a lot of RPMs requiring something to provide 'Perl::the' or just 'the', and sometimes other words that might follow 'use' in a sentence. I submitted a patch that checked for the various ways of opening a multi-line comment in Perl, and if it found one, skipped everything until the appropriate comment-closer. Shortly after that, they completely overhauled the Perl part of the RPM builder, but for a little while, my code was doing some good for the world at large, and I was quite chuffed when one of the Fedora/Red Hat high-and-mighties called it 'a clueful patch' on the mailing list message about it.
It didn't for some part of the first day, but it seemed to be fixed reasonably quickly. Works For Me at the moment. Have you tried again lately? (My bookmark has a final slash, '/Week/', but it seems to work either way. And in at least some cases, pun intended, capitalisation seems optional, at least in the case of the On Call tag.)
"Existing age assurance technologies are either insufficiently accurate, undermine privacy and data security, or are not widely available across populations," the letter says….To be fair, I'm pretty sure there will be sites that manage all three, much less two out of three (and possibly disproving Meatloaf's thesis as a by-product).
And evolve != improve. Evolution doesn't select for what might be best from our point of view. Just for what's most effective. It can certainly lead to organisms becoming what we would consider worse, in various ways.
ETA: Also, originally, 'evolve' pretty much did mean 'change'. It's only the past few centuries that it's come to be associated particularly with this whole gradual-change-by-random-variation-and-natural-selection thing. But it still has a broader sense in which it can be used.
True story: It recently came to my attention that there is a Spaceballs sequel on its way (disappointingly not actually subtitled The Search for More Money). I went to check for a release date, and saw 23 April. Went looking for UK release date, didn't see anything specifically UK; went to cinema sites, didn't see any listings of it for this week. Was starting to worry (for a few days even!) that it might not be getting a UK release. Finally went back to the original source, and this time, finally noticed where it says '2027' right after the '23 April' bit. Boy, was my face red!
"They're ready to move faster... we're ready to shortcut wherever we can in order to get a module up there."Yeah, certainly, nothing's ever gone badly in spaceflight just because they cut a few corners to get things up in time, right? What's the worst that could happen? -->
Reading between the lines, I think the 'narrow' and 'wide' pixels refers to the beam emitted by them, rather than the actual linear or area size of the pixels, and wouldn't affect the resolution or PPI (but very possibly the brightness, but I suppose that's sort of the point). I may be wrong about that, though.
It's less hypothetical than that, even. There was the recent emergency patch of the Airbus 320 family in December (or maybe November?) to make them more resilient in the event of such a bit flip, after it was suspected that just such a thing had caused a sudden loss of altitude whilst otherwise peacefully cruising along at speed.
