The biggest problem is that the magnets will “quench”, which is what happens when a superconducting electromagnet suddenly stops being superconducting.

There’s a lot of energy stored in that magnet, and when it quenches the energy all turns to heat in a very short time. Any remaining helium will flash boil, turning into an explosive expansion of gas, and the thermal shock will seriously damage the machine

It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

No, basically. They would love to be able to do that, but it’s approximately impossible for the generative systems they’re using at the moment

Hey now, some of us have standards.

We have shitty python scripts

No, I’m arguing that the extra complexity is something to avoid because it creates new attack surfaces, new opportunities for bugs, and is very unlikely to accurately deal with all of the edge cases.

Especially when you consider that the behaviour we have was established way before there even was a unicode standard which could have been applied, and when the alternative you want isn’t unambiguously better than what it does now.

“What is language” is a far more insightful question than you clearly intended, because our collective best answer to that question right now is the unicode standard, and even that’s not perfect. Making the very core of the filesystem have to deal with that is a can of worms which a competent engineer wouldn’t open without very good reason, and at best I’m seeing a weak and subjective reason here.

The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there’s no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn’t good for a system which needs to support the whole world.

In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn’t ASCII. It’s also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just ‘/’ and ‘\0’, I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.

Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we’d probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages

Fair enough, I didn’t consider compute resources

The actual length of the password isn’t the problem. If they were “doing stuff right” then it would make no difference to them whether the password was 20 characters or 200, because once it was hashed both would be stored in the same amount of space.

The fact that they’ve specified a limit is strong evidence that they’renot doing it right

Because you might accidentally do something which breaks the system, or you might run a program which does something malicious without your knowledge.

By gating dangerous (or protected for any other reason) commands behind sudo, you create a barrier which is difficult to accidentally cross

True, I didn’t consider that. He’d still have to convince them though, which would be easier said than done if he wanted to entirely disregard the constitution

No. The ruling seems to have said that he can do anything he likes in his capacity as president, and he can’t be convicted of any criminal offence for it. It didn’t say that the people around him would have to go along with it, or that they’d be immune from prosecution.

It also left convenient wriggle room for the court to arbitrarily decide what constituted “official” actions, rather than him doing something privately, so they’ve effectively granted themselves a get out of jail free card to decide case-by-case in the future

There’s no need to leave earth, just lift it into a medium earth orbit. There are literally thousands of kilometres in between low earth orbit (where there are lots of communications, spy, navigation and weather satellites) and geosynchronous (where there are lots of communications satellites), and outside of those two there’s virtually nothing there

In principle they could have pulled out slightly, if there’s jostling and tiny movements in skull then you’d expect them to work loose over time if they’re not securely anchored

The default is as long as it is because most people value not losing data, or avoiding corruption, or generally preserving the proper functioning of software on their machine, over 90 seconds during which they could simply walk away.

Especially when those 90 seconds only even come up when something isn’t right.

If you feel that strongly that you’d rather let something malfunction, then you’re entirely at liberty to change the configuration. You don’t have to accept the design decisions of the package maintainers if you really want to do something differently.

Also, if you’re that set against investigating why your system isn’t behaving the way you expect, then what the hell are you doing running arch? Half the point of that distro is that you get the bleeding edge of everything, and you’re expected to maintain your own damn system

The question you should be asking is what’s wrong with that job which is causing it to run for long enough that the timeout has to kill it.

Systemd isn’t the problem here, all it’s doing is making it easy to find out what process is slowing down your shutdown, and making sure it doesn’t stall forever

It might not make him wrong, but he also happens to be wrong.

You can’t compare AI art or literature to AI software, because the former are allowed to be vague or interpretive while the latter has to be precise and formally correct. AI can’t even reliably do art yet, it frequently requires several attempts or considerable support to get something which looks right, but in software “close” frequently isn’t useful at all. In fact, it can easily be close enough to look right at first glance while actually being catastopically wrong once you try to use it for real (see: every bug in any released piece of software ever)

Even when AI gets good enough to reliably produce what it’s asked for first time & every time (which is a long way away for quite a while yet), a sufficiently precise description of what you want is exactly what programmers spend their lives writing. Code is a description of a program which another program (such as a compiler) can convert into instructions for the computer. If someone comes up with a very clever program which can fill in the gaps by using AI to interpret what it’s been given, then what they’ve created is just a new kind of programming language for a new kind of compiler

Perhaps not, but it would make it far easier for any sympathetic brain surgeon you managed to find who was willing to try and fix the problem for you.

The key thing is not needing that specific company to help, but needing generic expert assistance is fine

The story I heard was that charging is taking far longer than usual because of cold batteries, and people are having to change much more frequently for the same reason, and between the two the demand for chargers has shot up

Which is particularly surprising from a French company