Extent bounces around some, but volume continues to drop pretty steadily (from PIOMAS). The ice is getting thinner. As the volume starts to approach zero, the extent (area) covered will collapse.

Describing a dog-walking company, we have:

"Returns the number of dogs, always greater than 0, that are available for a walk during the time specified by hour"

"always greater than 0"? As this means that every compliant dog-walking company must never run out of dogs to walk, how could one start a dog-walking company? To even exist, it must already have registered dogs — available to be walked at any hour of day or night — or it cannot be instantiated in a valid manner.

Is there an unspecified requirement that one must never investigate the number of dogs to walk without already knowing that there are dogs available to walk, and that it causes undefined behavior or an unstated exception? If so, why is there no such test (e.g. isDogAvailable(int hour)) available in the API?

Perhaps the right answer is to reject this broken API, or to correct its contracts to say "no less than 0". Or perhaps to muddle through and pretend that the commented contracts are irrelevant? Regardless, I'm puzzled as to how a test question would come to exist.

If allowed a[n impossible] chance to let him know, I would also try to avoid bringing the discussion to our preference for treating "Last Chance to See" more as a checklist rather than a guide for corrective actions.

If it's annoying enough for long enough, there might be ... but it may also have a punitive cost.

I remember an incident when my father's stock-related company suddenly broke down starting on 1989-09-19, and I coined D32k to describe it. They recorded close-of-business stock data in days-since-turn-of-century, and that was the 32768th day of the century. All it took was any place in the code that used signed 16-bit values instead of unsigned 16-bit values, and suddenly the day after 1989-09-18 becomes 1810-04-15 due to the sign flip (32767 rolls over to -32768). It effectively halted a big portion of that company's operations until they found and patched that one ... after it struck.

Has something dramatic shifted in the market, such that a significant fraction of ticket sales are done through Fandango now? I haven't seen them mentioned for years.

Are they just relying on the Fandango population being a fair representation of the general paying movie-going public? Because it's not likely to be, given Fandango's surcharges; price-sensitive viewers will naturally tend to avoid them.

That's an interesting name for the person controlling the additives to fruit-flavored beverages.

Perhaps he's making up for the previous one.

Morocco's conveyor belt is "only" about 100 km, transporting about 3 million tonnes of phosphate each year.

But if this one in Japan is underground it probably won't be visible from space like Morocco's. The lack of dust being blown off of the parcels would also cut down on that.

I've been on Linux since the '90s and haven't so much as encountered Snap or Flatpak.

You must have chosen a distro that was wrong for you. I've been on Fedora since RedHat spun it off, but that's mainly an inertial choice and may not be right for others. But Linux is certainly not restrictive in that way.

COMEFROM is the real way to go.

I've done the same, but in some areas there are restrictions on the number of unrelated adult tenants. Some places set the limit as low as three.

I never would have expected in the '70s and '80s of my youth that the home-knit snow masks that were commonplace would later be auto-detected by AI as a proxy for school-shooting threats.

Was Skylab before your time?

I'll have the disc option until they shut it down in September.

Physical media's use of the First Sale Doctrine makes it effectively necessary to get a really deep catalog.

Please allow me to point out some flaws in your argument.

First, comparison of the world-wide birth rates vs. death rates is not useful because it does not take into account the rates relative to the level of societal education and development. In "Western" countries the population growth rate is close to zero or even negative. So your argument only has a basis (population-growth) in countries which do not have access to birth control or countries where women do not have rights or means to prevent conception.

Second, your argument fails to take into account technology development. The question could be rephrased as "What is the carrying capacity of the earth?" which could further be rephrased as as "What is the carrying capacity of a robust molecular nanotechnology enhanced earth?". Your argument only has merit if all people continue to reproduce at world-wide rates and if nanotechnology fails to develop. Assertions that I would claim you cannot make.

Now if you become informed about the real limits to a greater extent and wish to discuss them, then I would be happy to engage in such a discussion.

Robert

1. Q1 to bring to the discussion: "What is the hypsithermal limit of the Earth and why is it significant?" [2]
2. Bonus points: How does one escape the hypsithermal limits of the Earth?"