

You may enjoy Fritz Leiber’s short story, “A Pail of Air”, which involves the Earth being ejected.
Seer of the tapes! Knower of the episodes!


You may enjoy Fritz Leiber’s short story, “A Pail of Air”, which involves the Earth being ejected.


A .tar archive is basically only the files cat’ed together, with a header and index added, right?
Tar does not include an index. It’s just the headers and data cat’ed together. You have to read from the beginning of the archive until you find the file you want. This is exacerbated if the archive is also gzipped, since you have to decompress all the files leading up to the one you want, as opposed to skipping over them as you could do in an uncompressed tar archive.
So why is there no archive format that just cat’es the compressed files together?
That’s essentially what a zip archive does. Each file is compressed separately and cat’ed together with uncompressed headers in between. Also zip archives do have an index which is what allows for random access and easy changes. The downside is that the compression ratio of a zip archive can be worse than a tar.gz archive.


There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.


It may be possible…
It may not be necessary…
1945 is a very cherry-picky cutoff.

Yes, unless it’s an element of a crime like fraud or theft.


A Nintendo64 with several game cartridges. It’s a little flaky, but it still works for the most part.


Californian. No.
It wouldn’t solve any problems that can’t be solved by other means, and it would create new problems that we haven’t had to worry about before. It’d be a net loss for everyone involved.


From what I can tell it’s a tweet in which they “recommend” his nomination, rather than nominate him themselves.
While members of national legislatures are allowed to nominate people for a Nobel prize, national governments per se are not.
That detail is conspicuously absent from the announcement itself.


UI elements that expand and cover up other UI elements when you mouse over them.
“Flat” color schemes where you can’t even tell where one UI element ends and the other begins.
Infinite scroll instead of pagination.


He’ll have to show us his Earth certificate, though.


Some species of ants invade neighboring colonies and carry away larva to work as slaves.


If a motorcycle has to be ear-splittingly loud for “safety”, then it’s too dangerous to be road legal.

Pretty sure she’s flipping me off.
Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?!
You don’t need any help from me, sir.
That’s right! …
Almost certainly. You’d have to go out of your way to find a keyfob system that doesn’t. I administer a keyfob system at work, and I can tell you exactly whose key was used on which doors and at what times.
A glass of warm tap water.