Reminds me of Glasshouse. Hop into a nanoassembler gate, get your brain backed up, switch to a healthy new physical body if you fancy. Murder is a minor crime but identity theft is extremely serious. Works great until someone releases a worm that uses humans as transmission vectors, infecting the assembler gates and deleting certain memories from anyone who uses them. You have to put a lot of trust into whoever runs the technology, and they're bound to make mistakes.

Subsetting is not EOT functionality - EOT is basically just a wrapper around a TTF file, and subsetting just involves modifying the TTF, so you can do exactly the same in browsers that read raw TTF files. I've written a font optimizer tool (open source) that does that. (Windows has an API to generate embedded fonts with subsetting, which the WEFT tool uses; I'm not currently aware of any other subsetting implementations.)

Gazelle is from Microsoft Research, and their paper discusses the details of the security model - it's not just a marketing claim.

The idea is that every 'origin' (basically a domain name, which is used as the basis for access control in all modern browsers) is separated into its own sandboxed process. If a page on your domain embeds an iframe from an advertiser's domain, the iframe is rendered in a separate process, and all communication is handled through a Browser Kernel which enforces the security constraints (e.g. preventing the advert from touching or rendering anything outside its iframe box, even if an attacker can find a way to execute arbitrary code in it). Plugins are handled in the same way.

Chrome's security model doesn't handle that kind of separation of multiple sites within a single page. But Gazelle sacrifices some backward compatibility (e.g. it removes the document.domain attribute, and it requires all plugins to be rewritten to use the Browser Kernel instead of directly accessing the network or filesystem), which is unlikely to be acceptable in practice.

And Gazelle is certainly not a replacement for the IE engine - it's built on the existing IE7 components for parsing, rendering, scripting, etc. It's research, and the value is its ideas, some of which could perhaps be integrated into current browser engines to improve security. It's not meant to be a real browser engine, but it seems successful as a research experiment.

The PADDINGXXPADDING is just a standard artifact of the Visual C++ build process - there's a manifest XML string that's added to the .exe (for 'side-by-side' DLL dependency handling), and padding is added for some internal alignment requirements. (This article says the UpdateResource API is what adds that string). So it's nothing unusual or suspicious.

there was a pretty good David Attenborough programme on BBC TV last week about Darwin and Evolution that showed many of the subsequent discoveries

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life?

There's also an interesting quote from David Attenborough in response to people asking "why he did not give "credit" to God" for the subjects of his nature documentaries:

They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.

My father wouldn't let me read this because it's somewhat anti-feminist.

"Somewhat"? In Flatland, the social status of men is proportional to their number of sides (triangles are the lowest class, and priests are nearly circles); women are even lower, being straight lines. Women are not allowed to walk in public spaces without swaying and emitting noises, so that men do not accidentally get impaled on them. They have to enter their houses by the back door. They are considered "wholly devoid of brain-power", driven by emotion and instinct and lacking memory, and they receive no education.

But it's social satire, not a reflection of the author's views. He was "a firm believer in equality of educational opportunity, across social classes and in particular for women", and the book is attempting to highlight a Victorian mindset that was still prevalent at that time. The women in the book act in far more complex ways than their men give them credit for. The author even says "To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our Women may seem truly deplorable, and indeed it is" - he's not happy with how they're treated, and readers in Spaceland will hopefully see that it's caused by the absurd class system holding them back, though the narrator can't avoid falling back into the prejudices of his society.

The book makes more sense when you understand the context. The Annotated Flatland is quite interesting, providing some background on the author and mathematics and the society of the time.

("more sense" doesn't mean it actually does make sense - it all still seems a bit muddled to me, with a random mixture of physical differences and social differences between people, and strange science (like Lamarckian evolution where the actions of a parent affect the number of sides (hence social status) not of themselves but of their offspring), and sections that I don't understand the point of (like the whole thing about colour being discovered and then banned - it makes sense within Flatland but is it meant to be satirising anything in real life?). Much of it is probably because the world has changed so drastically in 125 years that I just can't understand where the author was coming from. But it's an interesting book despite (or perhaps because of) that.)

Yep, but I was responding to the "note that their chip uses doubles, not floats" statement, and my point was that it does doubles and floats (presumably somewhat like SSE).