If I recall from the Netflix documentary, Stockton Rush was insistent that the word "passenger" was never used and that OceanGate's paying customers were instead "mission specialists". This was the legal work-around that allowed the company to avoid government regulations. You'd think that his wealthy customers would have been savvy enough to understand what was going on, not least when signing the required waivers. What they might not have known was that the Titan was not registered, not even in the Bahamas, despite OceanGate being registered there.

Personally, I've sailed in a replica of a historical vessel not rated to carry passengers; it lacked multiple water-tight compartments for a start. I was "volunteer crew" and had to obtain the maritime certificate required to work aboard ships, including passing written and practical courses. While it seemed to me that safety was taken very seriously, I was aware when I signed on that there were greater risks than on a passenger vessel. Professional mariners aboard non-passenger vessels know the standards are lower, but there are still standards for registered vessels.

From an IT perspective there was neither authentication nor authorisation. Legally, however, many jurisdictions make it illegal to access data without being authorised to do so and, by "authorised", they mean legally authorised. The fact that there was no security mechanism isn't going help any person found to have accessed these data; they're hackers in the eyes of the law. Obviously companies like it this way; for them, it's not a bug but a feature.

The switches are mechanical with electrical contacts that sense their position; there's no way for software to change their physical position. The speculation is around whether some electrical or software fault may have made the system behave as if the switches had been moved to the cut-off position, e.g., wiring shorting out or disconnecting. This seems unlikely for multiple reasons. One pilot asking the other why they were off suggests that the switches could be seen to be in the cut-off position. Also, the software saw them cut-off 1 second apart, as if someone moved them one at a time, whereas an electrical or software issue would be more likely to affect both switches at the same time.

I'm going to go with, since 1 Jan 2025, i.e., the year so far.

It's the New York Times, not a scientific journal.

In 2023 this scientific article concluded "we are almost as likely as not to experience a negative leap second in the next 12 years." Check out Figure 4 to see the UTC-UT1 line curve back downward in a way that's never happened before since atomic time started in 1972. It's currently back in negative territory at -0.05s and, if makes it far past -0.5s, we'll need a negative leap second. Even the occasional positive leap second has caused software glitches in the past so an unprecedented negative leap second seems sure to cause more chaos.

It's just a restriction on having social media accounts. You can watch as much YouTube as you like without one but you can't make comments or see age-restricted videos.

Typical 65mm and 70mm frames are 53mm wide whereas 35mm frames are 22mm wide. That's only 2.4x wider (though the factor for area is greater, depending on which exact formats you're comparing). So 4K scales up to 10K and 16K is enough oversampling for a mastering scan. Remember that 4K refers to the number of pixels across the screen, not to a total pixel count.

The list of 70 mm films isn't that long.

IMAX is bigger again, though mostly in frame height. Its popularity has taken off as technology makes it more affordable but the list of masterpieces on that format is very short.

VPNs don't "violate copyright protections". It's like thinking that aircraft violate copyright if I use them to travel to another country to buy a book not available in my own. VPNs do allow you to violate contracts with suppliers ... but that's not the same thing.

Now try passenger-miles travelled by train per head of population. Taking the 25-country list you're presumably using and dividing miles per year by population has Japan first with 3285 and the US third-last at 131. The average is 975. The list only includes countries with at least 5 billion passenger kilometres per year; there will be many others with fewer miles but which are far ahead of the US on a per-capita basis due to their small populations.

This bug has zero to do with Unicode. The issue seems to be that the software generating the "&" doesn't realise that its output is being parsed and that it should instead be generating "&". Notice that all of the characters involved here are plain, 7-bit ASCII. We know this is true because ... this is Slashdot and Unicode is impossible. The fact that the ampersand is special in this context is nothing to do with Unicode, in which it has the category "other punctuation".

Well it's either that or have no anti-virus. In this case, other companies recovered faster than Delta, but it would be easy for AV software to screw up much worse and trash all the hosts to the point of requiring OS reinstallation. That's going to be very bad for any large business.

Gross negligence is just a greater degree of negligence, commonly described by words like wilful, wanton and reckless. Criminal is worse, e.g., involving intent to do harm. Not that there aren't contexts in which gross negligence is criminal, like in situations where there's a risk of injury or death. This is part of the reason some software companies ban the use of their products in medical and nuclear fields.

I agree that the only correct character to use as the apostrophe should be the actual, ASCII, 0x27, ', apostrophe. The problem people have with this is that it looks horrible typographically because fonts generally have a vertical symbol (so it can also work as an opening or closing single quote). The correct fix is to use fonts where the apostrophe looks like a closing single quote. Obviously that's a disaster for coding ... so code with a console font. There are plenty of common fonts that are ambiguous about O and 0, and about 1, l, and I, so why care about apostrophes looking the same as closing single quotes? There are separate acute accent and prime symbol characters for use when those are required.

Editing prose (with a console font) is way easier when the open quote, close quote, and apostrophe characters are all different. Spell checkers aren't confused about closing quotes being part of a word and checking for broken pairs of quotes becomes trivial with regular expressions. LaTeX does this right, accepting an ASCII apostrophe in the input and producing the correct output. All the "smart-quote"-like WYSIWYG solutions are always breaking on edge cases.

There are the M-disc variants of CDs, DVDs, and BDs. These can be used with some popular brands of burners and work by deforming a layer, so they're not prone to dyes fading. It's cheap for an archival system and the discs are readable by standard hardware. Sure, Blu-ray drives might not be common in 2045 but they should be obtainable; at least you have a better chance than with some new, special-purpose technology that might never take off.

Use Airbnb's Australian site to search; local laws require the up-front display of the full, all-inclusive price. Then you can use your normal Airbnb account to make the bookings.