Microsoft's popular Arial font was created to have the exact same dimensions and spacing as Helvetica. Font designs and things like spacing aren't protected by copyright law, only the actual code that defines the fonts, the font file, is.

The Microsoft version renders nicely on screen, and be substituted for Helvetica in print, and was much cheaper than licencing Helvetica itself. Apple did later licence Helvetica, but it looks crap on screen when rendered using their mediocre font rendering code.

Anyway, there is an opportunity here for someone to make a very similar, metric compatible font, and sell it for $350/year.

They could send Dragon to the moon, but it would need a fair bit of development work. More fuel, longer term habitation. It will also need to transport the lander there, so will need some kind of adapter and some way to either launch with it attached, or to collect it in Earth orbit.

It's not impossible, but I wouldn't place any bets on who gets there first.

Sometimes they aren't even mistakes. A classic one is "Diet Water". In Japanese, the word "water", as in the English loan word that they have adopted, refers to flavoured health/energy drinks. They have a word for actual water, "mizu", as you might expect.

Google already has: https://fonts.google.com/

Not all made by Google, but all open source.

If you filter by language you can see that some languages are not very well covered.

What conspiracy? China has announced they plan to land humans "around 2030", and the progress they have shown on a lander suggests that they are on track for that. They have heavy lift rockets capable of performing the mission with lunar orbit rendezvous (the same as NASA is planning), and they have already soft landed probes and rovers on the moon. They have a history of sticking to their announced timescales, which tend to be conservative.

Therefore the question is if NASA can get there first. Starliner is floundering, SpaceX's Starship is ambitious and they have a lot of work to do (man rating, in-orbit refuelling, and likely an unmanned trip around the moon). Then Blue Origin or SpaceX need to demonstrate a working lander, and that likely means an automated landing and return to orbit before a crew can go. NASA also needs to demonstrate lunar orbit rendezvous for whatever craft they end up using too.

It's December 2025, so they probably have around 4-5 years maximum, although China may go even sooner.

At the moment I'd say it's even odds if it is a US or Chinese lander that touches down first.

There aren't many good open source fonts for Japanese. There weren't even that many good ones for Latin languages, until Google started releasing some under free licences.

By "good" I mean good coverage of all characters, proper keming, good hinting so that they render well and consistently on screen and in print, etc. It's a lot of work, and Japanese has a lot of characters.

We shall see I guess. I wouldn't put money on SpaceX being the first to land crew on the moon though. They are scheduled to do it second anyway, but I think Blue Origin has a better chance of having a lander ready for whenever NASA is good to go.

Depends how you count it. They did multiple practice attempts before managing to land New Glenn.

Blue Origin is impressive though, they seem to have a much better system than SpaceX. Their rocket can take larger diameter payloads than Falcon Heavy too.

It took every other company that has managed it a few attempts too. It's just hard. They did get their dummy payload to orbit this time, which is significant for this new rocket.

Note that they will be the first to land an orbital rocket. Other Chinese companies have landed sub-orbital boosters before.

They have a few firsts under their belt already. First methalox and first methane rockets to orbit, in the world. Fart powered rockets are pretty cool.

There was that period in the 2000s when faux Celtic symbols were popular. They looked cool for about 5 minutes, then they were too common.

Most people with Chinese characters don't seem to have bothered to figure out what the actual word they want is, they just pick some that sound kinda like the English version, or what some website claimed it was. Often they end up being kinda funny to people who can read Chinese. I met a guy who thought he had is name in Japanese on his arm, but it actually said "Paula".

Same goes for clothes. Super Dry print complete nonsense on their clothes, for some reason. Not even a mistake, it looks like they just randomly selected some text that looks cool from multiple sources, fragments of words here and there, and mashed them all together. At least my Japanese shirt that says "assumption is the mother of screw-up" is attempting to make sense.

It's supplementary information that the buyer should be aware of. If an area is liable to flood, they can look to see what measures the owner has put in place to prevent that, or if the elevation of that particular house is higher than the water is likely to rise.

Of course, even if that particular house doesn't flood, having a flood in that area is still a problem. It might limit the owner's ability to travel, it might cause utilities to be cut off for days on end.

It might also affect insurance. In the UK, if your house is within so many metres of a river or lake, you tend to pay more even if it has never flooded. Same with large trees near the property, which may fall on it in extreme weather, or cause its foundations to shift due to roots undermining them.

The main issue is that he doesn't communicate much. For years people have reported issues on GitHub, he hasn't interacted at all with them, but they get quietly fixed in the next release. That was fine until this happened, and people were scrambling to find malware-free versions, and looking for updates.

He put out a statement saying he would publish a new version with a new signing key, and at that time explain exactly what happened. So far there has been a beta with the new key, and no other updates, which is pretty much how he has always done things.

To make matters worse, people on Reddit and on Github have been pointing to versions they claim are not infected, but with little evidence beyond maybe a VirusTotal scan. Given the lack of information from the developer, it is unwise to trust them.

It's a shame because SmartTube is one of the best apps ever. YouTube, with ad blocking, SponsorBlock (skips over in-video ads), and DeArrow (replaced clickbait thumbnails and video titles with descriptive ones), and many quality of life features like disabling auto-translation and having easy access to playing videos incognito.

Hopefully it recovers quickly. Normally he gets updates out within days or even hours when YouTube breaks something, and it's been several days already.

Has it? They still operate in China, and Chinese law requires them to cooperate with the government, store Chinese user's cloud data in-country, and more.

Meanwhile Google did actually decide not to enter the Chinese market. Maybe you are getting them confused.

Why are US lawmakers so bad at their jobs that these kinds of work-arounds are a thing? Don't they get experts to write the laws, and then fire them if they screw up this badly?

I've noticed that a lot of US tech companies don't understand how this isn't normal, and when they discover that the same work-arounds don't work in Europe, they get very upset.