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  • It's controlled by whether the stream's opened in text mode or binary mode. On Unix, they're the same, but on Windows, text mode has line ending conversion.

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  • Lots of ad companies and other data harvesters who wanted to keep being evil put out a lot of misinformation about things the GDPR would outlaw, and some of it stuck, so plenty of people think the GDPR says things it doesn't. In general, you're safe as long as you don't do anything obviously dodgy or send data to a company likely to do evil things with it, but in a world where nearly everyone uses Google analytics to monitor if their site goes down, everyone had to change something and there was plenty of opportunity to scare people by telling them they needed to change more than they really did.

  • And in this case, it's going to be really hard to do that as Israel doesn't allow journalists unsupervised access to Gaza, which more responsible news outlets mention when they say they can't independently verify claims.

  • It's not guaranteed that it's interpreted as a platitude by the person it's directed at, and when the mismatch between the task and the work done is big enough to make it obviously a platitude, it's just patronising, and risks being more insulting than not saying it at all.

  • The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, "good attempt" could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn't good at all, it's bad. If you'd asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it's impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it's completely inappropriate as it'd stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it's incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it's sensitive to moisture.

    The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.

  • Other people took the role for short periods of the first season due to the whole premise of the show being body switching, and they were all competent at being Takeshi Kovach. If the second season had been as competently executed as the first season, the recast wouldn't have been a problem (but probably wouldn't have chosen Mackie unless it turned out the problem really was just the director making him act badly).

  • I was meaning that the blade count and detachability was the difference in definition between turboprop and propfan/open turbofan, not that it was necessarily the thing making the engine more efficient.

  • I've seen turboprops in museums and on the internet with around six or eight blades. When I looked on the Wikipedia page for propfan engines, which seems to be another name for an open turbofan, the distinction seemed to be mainly how the blades were shaped (like propellor blades or turbine blades) and how tightly-integrated everything is (you can swap the propeller out on a turboprop).

  • How many blades do you have to add to a turboprop before it's promoted to an open turbofan and touted as a major new innovation?

  • Trans people have been able to compete at the Olympics since the mid nineties, so if male puberty really did have such a large effect on performance, we'd have had next to no cis women win medals for three decades. Instead, every women's Olympic medal in that period went to a cis woman. Taking enough hormones to physically change the shape of your body has a detrimental enough effect on athletic performance to wipe out the advantage from male puberty. In principle, an athlete could gain the advantage back by stopping taking HRT, but the Olympic rules require stable hormone levels for two years, so they'd just disqualify themselves if they tried.

  • There are people who have genuine medical reasons to not take vaccines (e.g. an allergy to a common ingredient) or who are so immunocompromised that a vaccine won't keep them alive, and they rely on other people getting vaccinated to avoid dying. It's not just antivaxers who antivaxers kill.

  • Humans with two working eyes can tell the difference between a flat painted surface and a 3D world. Humans with only one eye might crash, though.

  • The fuel was going to end up burned anyway, so it's only bad for the environment in that it's incomplete combustion with lots of soot. It's also preventing other fuel getting processed, so it could be a net benefit.

  • Starburst is the brand. The product you're thinking of is Starburst Fruity Chews (formerly known as Opal Fruits), but they make other products. They used to make the best jelly beans, under the name Starburst Joosters, but they got discontinued. It looks like either they're back, but under the much more boring name Starburst Jellybeans, or they've decided to make different jelly beans so given them a new name. Either way, they're still not available in the UK, and people seem to be complaining that the recipe changed recently to make them worse, so the hope this thread gave me has been thoroughly dashed.

  • It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it's stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who's been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren't much use.

  • Someone was telling me the other day that the cheapest new car available in the UK was an electric Dacia. Obviously, you can get a used car for less than a new one, but electric cars are within reach of normal people, or at least normal enough people to not have Mr Moneybags budgets.

  • It's inertial dampeners. The gravity plating makes them stick to the floor. The inertial dampeners dampen the inertia.

  • In Strange New Worlds, which is set earlier than Scotty could have invented that, the doctor keeps patients in the pattern buffer when their condition is deteriorating and there's nothing he can do to stop it. It's presented as janky and his own invention, and not necessarily harmless.

  • Would it be a non-planet for the millions of years it would take to clear its orbit?

    Does Earth’s body/features magically change somehow for the duration of the clearing process, so that it doesn’t resemble a planet?

    Clearing the orbit of other material, and in the process, accumulating it and incorporating it into a protoplanet is the process that turns a protoplanet into a planet. While that's happening, it's getting bigger and rounder and is constantly surrounded by impact debris that's in the process of forming moons and rings or is in a decaying orbit. All of these are processes local to the protoplanet that don't happen anymore once it's become a planet.

  • Everything about Earth is still the same, skies, oceans, etc. Only difference is that it’s crowded in by other bodies now.

    Is pretty clearly saying the skies and oceans would be the same after the Earth's been swapped with part of the Sun.