You don’t normally need to specify that the sides are parallel if you specify four right angles.

I didn’t notice until now that your characters sometimes slightly cover the text boxes! Very cool.

Well, that’s certainly the answer.

I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to put a building quite that close to the waterfront even in a Fjord, but apparently they did.

I don’t think the US/Canada usually does that style of power pole, with three phases on a crossarm and no neutral below.

Barriers on what looks like a pretty low-traffic low-risk road too.

I would think somewhere Scandinavia or central Europe. NZ wouldn’t put barriers like that up.

Rock wall near bottom of picture screams old.

The headline margin of error only applies at the centre (50%), and decreases towards the extremes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error#Specific_margins_of_error

Wikipedia says that for a poll with 1013 participants and the same headline margin of error, a 2% result would be ±0.8%.

It’s more likely that this is the crowd who deliberately gives the most absurd answer possible.

Dealing with bump and sway is mostly a matter of running a ballast cleaner/tamper/regulator along the track more regularly. Maybe replacing some rail. Unless the actual sub-foundation is bad; that gets really disruptive.

Much cheaper than trying to ease curves, gradients, structure clearance, or provide grade separation.

More generally, -ate itself means ‘with oxygen’.

Carbonate = carbon + oxygen

Nitrate = nitrogen + oxygen

Phosphate = phosphorus + oxygen

There is apparently some nuance but it is a good rule to remember: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/32962/when-to-use-ate-and-ite-for-naming-oxyanions

And the Blackadder equivalent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6mJw50OdZ4

Waze is of course owned by Google…

I’ve certainly never heard of a chicken ranch, but plenty of chicken farms.

With software that misuses /tmp, I’m more worried about burning out my SSD endurance than running out of RAM.

Only 15mL and into a syringe, right?

Yeah, I have no idea either, but it’s been around for more than a decade so it should be fairly easy to find a library that duplicates it.

I would be wary of AI-based solutions. There’s a risk of it picking up e.g. satirical/spoof sponsorships as actual ads, and perhaps not detecting unusual ads.

I’m slightly terrified of the day someone starts getting AI to reword and read out individual ads for each stream.

You definitely would have legal issues redistributing the ad-free version.

Sponsor block works partly because it simply automates something the user is already allowed to do - it’s legally very safe. No modification or distribution of the source file is necessary, only some metadata.

It’s an approach that works against the one-off sponsorships read by the actual performers, but isn’t effective against ads dynamically inserted by the download server.

One option could be to crowdsource a database of signatures of audio ads, Shazam style. This could then be used by software controlled by the user (c.f. SB browser extension) to detect the ads and skip them, or have the software cut the ads out of files the user had legitimately downloaded, regardless of which podcast or where the ads appear.

Sponsorships by the actual content producers could then be handled in the same way as SB: check the podcast ID and total track length is right (to ensure no ads were missed) then flag and skip certain timestamps.

Apparently still alive at 85: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goodstein

The screen turning off when it automatically locks is an added bonus; the priority is to be able to command the system to simultaneously lock and turn off the screen. You’re correct that the setting at zero seconds safely achieves that.

I’ve had other, more stupid uses for running commands, though I don’t think any are actively in use.

Taking actions on network reconfiguration, charge completion, and SMART failure are all things that spring to mind. It’s nice to be able to set those kinds of things in a GUI rather than putting them in /etc/something.d

Has it occurred to you that sometimes there’s actual evidence backing up the things you ridicule?

You can go measure the acidity of rain in your back yard if you want.

The sunlight in NZ is far, far harsher than if you go a few thousand kilometres towards the equator, where it should be hotter. We have some of the world’s highest rates of skin cancer. Are you implying that crisis actors are faking having skin cancer?

What I want is not (just) that the screen turns off when the lock timer times out, but that I can push ‘lock’ or a key combination and have the system lock and the screen turn off immediately.

The new ‘when locked, turn off screen’ setting should help with this, but setting it too low will presumably make it hard to unlock.

For running backups, ‘after a period of inactivity’ could help.

It still seems like the removal of a useful feature.

“I thought it would be helpful” to the boss being CCed in.

I expect they are talking about the ‘irrevocably’ part, as one of the core tenets of GDPR is that consent can be withdrawn.

I couldn’t say whether or not that applies here.