Wouldn't a file like this have to exploit a whole variety of codecs simultaneously? Surely there must be many decoders on the market, some of them even in hardware. Or has libavcodec recently become the most popular target? I would have thought that an attacker would go after the Windows Media Player instead, simply because of the installed base.

And by computing workforce, you mean this?

Furthermore, even quite some time after the advent of digital computers, there was this period in which the prevalent opinion in the field was that computer hardware design happened to be the actually important (and perhaps prestigious) job whereas programming said computers was a lowly, clerical work... I don't think that anyone should be surprised to whom these new jobs initially went. In other words, I find it plausible that the initial high involvement of women in early computing was actually a symptom of pre-existing sexism rather than of later-lost equality.

So...who did the one guy play with?

I think you're talking about neoliberals there. That's the one movement derived from liberalism that I'm aware of being highly overlapping with conservative people who want to dictate how other people should live.

Now why would you feel that way about people favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy? Are you a slave owner, an absolute monarchist, or a theocrat?

DuckDuckCover?

Canned air and the Joule-Thomson effect to the rescue? :D

I thought virtually all Republicans were bananas?

It's also probably in part due to reduction of infectious disease epidemics, again through sanitation (no more cholera and plague). Also, antiseptic birth, or how that thing is called - which I'm not sure if it counts as "sanitation" as such, but again, a similar principle. And food security, perhaps? That's the only major non-hygiene-related factor that I can come up with. Famines were a regular occurrence in pre-modern times, after all.

Considering an unsteady hand, perhaps you shouldn't be thinking about it in terms of a quadratic relationship but rather in terms of a linear one? Hint: draw the geometry of the light spot passing over the eye in both cases.

It's significantly diverging primarily because of the laws of physics. Even "perfect" optics wouldn't help because you can't simultaneously have a small aperture and a low-divergence beam. And I'm acutely aware that increasing its divergence only exacerbates the problem, that's why I concluded some time ago that it's a dumb thing to do.

If they were closer to Mars, for example (dug into Phobos?), they'd be able to make real time control decisions for the martian roving vehicles, vastly improving their utilization. Speed of light is horrible for efficient operation of such devices. Some progressive Martian mission designs anticipate this scenario.

So could powerful flashlights and astronomical telescopes, considering that you could put them together and use the telescope in reverse.

Fortunately, thanks to the laws of physics, such a laser would have to have an aperture of at least 10 to 20 cm, but probably much more, and thus would be very conspicuous.

Of course they do. Without a lens, a laser diode's beam would so divergent as to be unusable for most applications.