You know when you're sitting on a train in a station next to another and if the other train starts to move, you might think your train is the one that's moving? Something similar is happening here, but more vertically. gloop gloop gloop

I could have sworn that the last time I tried to tar-copy part of a filesystem containing hard links that I ended up with copies everywhere rather than preservation of the hard links, and the tar manual page isn't particularly clear about it at all.

But it looks like I've misremembered because a quick test with tar confirms that it detects and saves hard links, and they unpack correctly too. Now I'm wondering precisely what it was that I was doing where I ended up with all those copies.

Edit: disregard this. I have gotten my wires crossed somewhere.

tar cannot preserve hard links, where rsync can. Definitely something to bear in mind before doing a full drive copy.

As for why anyone would choose hard links over symlinks, sometimes, for some purposes, it's not clear which file should be the target and which the link and also, symlinks - especially explicit, non-relative symlinks - are very easily broken when files are moved around. Patching them all can be a pain.

It's more insidious this side of the Atlantic. At least in countries where non-native* people are commonplace anyway.

But right across the board the insidiousness takes the form of not caring rather than being outright hateful. So when, as others mention, far-right, definitely hatefully racist, political candidates start being elected, those who vote for them have carried their lack of caring over.

Those who don't care don't discourage racism so it continues to exist. To flourish. I believe that MLK Jr. said that those people are worse than the hateful - he called them "white moderates" - because they stand by and do nothing when they're greater in number than the actual racists and could actually do something about it.

* Yes, I know "native" is a problematic word, but I don't want to have to unpick that for the sake of this comment.

Fly into his house. Quantum Leap taught me that in some cultures that's considered very bad luck, and in an existential, "your future is ruined" sense, not just the "oh $#!% there's a bird in the house flapping everywhere and $#!%ing on everything" sense.

The same show also suggested not to do so with a friend because that's supposedly good luck again. I suppose having to clean up double bird splatter counts for good karma or something.

« Ce n'est pas une paix, c'est un armistice de vingt ans » — Ferdinand Foch about the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Often translated as "This isn't a peace treaty, it's an armistice for twenty years." but some might prefer "This is no peace, it's a twenty-year ceasefire."

Oh, I know how to do that. You move the stick without pushing the clutch.

At the risk of annoying someone who doesn't appreciate a lack of nuance, the saying goes:

Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.

Garfield begs to differ.

An experiment in pupil science

Well, it is pronounced "blow high" (or something pretty close). And to continue the fun facts, English used to have the word "haye" which is related to the Swedish word, but we stopped using it in favour of "shark". Since it sounds like a greeting (as does "high" for that matter) as well as a common feedstock for animals (hay), we'd probably use the alternative "hayefish", with or without the 'e', if we hadn't dropped it altogether.

Sure. It could be an abstraction based on physics in a higher universe to which there are impossible barriers to accessing further understanding.

Just look at any video game universe.

In retrospect it was probably a mistake to let Russia get away with occupying Crimea back in 2014. The rest of the world opted for the quiet life and hoped it would stop there. Unfortunately it only emboldened certain individuals within Russia to start meddling again, thinking that everyone else had gone soft.

Well we'd certainly let our guard down, no mistake there. Gone soft is an entirely different matter. As they're now finding out.

"In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The other half to this is not to advertise on every post you come across even if it seems relevant. Knowing where and when to do it is a fine art that I'm not going to pretend I have good advice for. Advice, sure. Good, maybe not.

Too much means that people will notice and you might be accused of spamming (or worse, ignored or banned), but knowing how much is too much is the tricky part. It almost certainly varies by place and time as well, so it might be a case of lurking around and getting a feel for things.

So I checked a bit more and pre-Boxxy Catie and the copypasta both appeared online in 2006, so it's probably not a parody of her specifically, just girls like the Boxxy character Catie created. Funny coincidence about the name though.

"We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against what we say we believe to be military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities."

The important unsaid part needs to be in there. Whether an opponent actually puts military installations inside civilian locations or not (generally a bad move), this gives war criminals carte blanche to bomb whatever they feel like.

Classic nature versus nurture debate. Assuming identical male twins, anyway. Anything else and the answer is far more likely to be "no". Bob probably has a bigger D than his twin sister Sally. Probably.

But once you narrow it down, well, they really ought to be the same unless something significant happened to one and not the other. Note that the significance of that thing might not at first appear to be significant, however.

e.g. Maybe one time and only one time, Mom or Dad fed one of them twice by accident when the twins were infants and then had to the feed the hungry one "again" when he wouldn't stop crying (if they realised the error or not).

That one extra bottle of milk with no other differences might have made for a lifetime of difference between the two. And you still can't be sure which one would end up better endowed. Maybe something latent in the twins' genes would gives a hungry baby the advantage later in life, so to speak.

ETA: If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, you might find pictures out there on the internet. If it isn't, you might want to perform the same experiment using women's attributes instead. I understand certain forms of twin "art" are quite popular.

There is a problem with this plan: A public-serving pharmacist is unlikely to want to sell in bulk to anyone, and especially not someone who is ranting or deluded.

As such, your vaccine conspiracy theorist will come away thinking that they weren't given the vaccines because "they knew we'd find the chips".

You'd basically have to break the law to break the conspiracy: Steal the vaccines. (This is a hypothetical. Do not steal the vaccines.)

And even then, I'm sure the conspiracy theorist would come up with some way of explaining why that batch didn't have the chips in it. "They were too small for even the microscope to see." / "They knew we were coming and let us steal fakes." / "They're arresting us to keep up the act." / "I bet this prison food has microchips in it too."

The original meme has the person's name as "katy", and Boxxy's real name is Catie, so whoever wrote the original might well have been parodying her.

Edit: After a bit more research, there's the tiniest sliver of a chance it might have been based on her pre-Boxxy online activity, because it pre-dates her use of the name, but it's probably nothing to do with her.