TFA says at least some of the packets were labelled as "stud earrings". I assume US Customs opens or X-rays a random selection of incoming packets and rejects any where the contents isn't as described. I wonder if the scammer actually sells stud earrings, or if they just put that on the label because (they thought) the seeds would look like stud earrings on an X-ray?

Maybe this scam has been going on for years, and the only reason we've noticed now is that seeds suddenly became cheaper than whatever they were shipping before. (Someone's brother-in-law had a few trucks full of them that he needed to dispose of in a hurry?)

Blockchain (or software generally) is also a bad idea for elections because, unless you understand the mathematics and can read the code, you can't verify that the outcome matches the votes. (You can hire an expert, but how do you verify that they're telling the truth?) With a paper system, it's easy to watch the ballot papers move through the system, and easy to confirm that the people or machines tallying the votes are doing it accurately.

The reason for all the fiddly syntax in languages that are considered unsuitable for teaching to beginners isn't to make programs harder to write: it's to make them easier to debug. If a program written in a language with a flexible and forgiving syntax doesn't do what you want, you sometimes have to figure out what you really told the computer to do before you can start figuring out how those instructions are wrong.

JavaScript has a feature called automatic semicolon insertion, which is meant to make it easier for people who shouldn't be writing programs to write programs. It might be OK on its own, but it interacts badly with other features that are supposed to benefit people who shouldn't be writing programs. Broadly speaking, it says that if a line doesn't end in a semicolon, but would be syntactically correct if it did end in a semicolon, the interpreter assumes that you meant to put a semicolon there.

For instance, if you have this at the end of a function:

return
true;

JavaScript interprets that as return; true; which causes the function to return an undefined value. The true; after it is ignored, firstly because JavaScript doesn't complain about unreachable code, and secondly because every statement in JavaScript is really an expression that returns a value. Often you don't care what the value is, so the interpreter doesn't complain if you throw it away.

Many of the victims of this kind of scam are old enough that they have no idea what an Apple Gift Card is.

It is a legitimate concern, since it's now impossible for the people who count the votes to know whether anyone voted without any outside interference. But it's difficult to make interference scale to the point where it can influence the outcome of the election, since most constituencies in the UK have tens of thousands of voters. And if you do manage to make the interference scale, it's difficult to conceal it from the authorities. The UK is not (yet) some third-world shithole, where politicians are more like warlords, with private armies who go around harassing and beating one another's supporters...

One can pre-process numeric literals, so you don't have to do that at runtime, but that expands them from an average of 3 bytes to 6.

The Sinclair ZX81 (sold as the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the USA) actually did that, and programmers who were trying to cram as much code as possible into the tiny RAM would declare variables to hold commonly-used numeric values such as 0 or 1, thus throwing away any speed improvement...

I'll overlook the fact that this judge is overstepping his authority by basically assigning the copyright to them as a remedy (so they have legal authority to get the videos taken down).

The women, at least in some cases, were coerced into signing the contract, which makes the contract null and void. If the contract says the copyright in the video belongs to the company, then without the contract, copyright remains with the people who made the video.* The woman would then have enough of a claim on the copyright to be able to issue valid takedown notices.

* This depends on which country's laws apply. In some countries, the default is that the copyright belongs to whoever created the work. I understand the USA is one such country. In other countries, the default is that copyright belongs to whoever caused the work to be created, or whoever paid the creators.

The buses in London have already done that. You can't pay cash for a ticket when you board the bus. You have to use a contactless card or your phone or an Oyster card, or buy a paper ticket in advance somewhere else. (The paper tickets are valid for a day or a few days, so you don't have to keep buying them.)

I thought the other idea behind carbon credits was that the supply would reduce over time, so the price would go up, and eventually a polluting company would find it impossible to make a profit. Before they reached that point, their shareholders wouldn't accept lower dividends or share prices, and would insist the company clean up. Or am I missing something obvious?

The sharks were going to be robots, though that makes the idea only slightly less silly.

It's baffling enough that they haven't every adopted Alt-` to cycle through windows of an application. I use that on linux all of the time.

I never knew you could do that. Thanks! (And there was me cursing Ubuntu 18.04 for changing Alt-Tab so that it no longer steps through all the open windows, just one from each application.)

Don Knuth came up with a way of representing really big integers. He observed that multiplication is repeated addition and exponentiation is repeated multiplication, and devised a way to represent repeated exponentiation.

I'm happy to take your word for that :-) I live in England, where daily life pretty much stops as soon as the temperature drops below freezing.