Ah yes, the lollipop guild defence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_HBmZuJlHs

and Windows 10 is obviously so outdated it’s not even worth including

4th row 3rd icon

They should add it in C++26

That is a ridiculous and baseless accusation that just by chance happens to be true

It actually means di-aboly, as in having two abolies. An aboly is an organ exclusively found in beetles that regulates certain hormoes.

And it’s called ironclad because they are well known for manufacturing and wearing suits of armor.

Seconded! I also can’t wait to find out whether Chopper can save Vegapunk, but that’s probably a ways away still…

“There are ways” ≠ this is what happens by default when done by the average user

No point discussing this if neither of us is going to prove it one way or the other.

Bitmaps are actually a key part of what I was thinking about, so you agree with me there it seems. There’s also the issue of using the wrong paper size. .IIRC Windows usually defaults to Letter for printing even in places where A4 is the only common size and no one has heard of Letter, and most people don’t realise their prints are cropped/resized. This would still apply when printing to PDF.

They maintain a high quality but not lossless.

As a trivial example, if you use the wrong paper size (like Letter instead of A4) then it might crop parts of the page or add borders or resize everything. Again I’ll admit, in 99% of cases it doesn’t matter, but it might matter if, say, an embedded picture was meant to be exactly to scale.

You are arguing that Elsevier shouldn’t exist at all, or needs to be forcibly changed into something more fair and more free. I 100% agree with this.

But my point was in general, not about Elsevier but about all digital publications of any kind. This includes indie publications and indie games. If an indie developer makes a game, and it gets bought maybe 20 copies but pirated thousands of times, do you still say “fuck that” to figuring out which “customer” shared the game?

I agree with “fuck that” to huge publishers, and by all means pirate all their shit, but smaller guys need some way to safeguard themselves, and there’s no way to decide that small guys can use a certain tool and big guys cannot.

What

See my reply to another comment

You’re pushing it through one system that converts a PDF file into printer instructions, and then through another system that converts printer instructions into a PDF file. Each step probably has to make adjustments with the data it’s pushing through.

Without looking deeply into the systems involved, I have to assume it’s not a lossless process.

That’s true. I was actually thinking/talking about this practice in general, not specifically with regards to Elsevier.

I definitely agree that scientific journals as they are today are unacceptable.

I feel like this will cause quality degradation, like repeatedly re-compressing a jpeg. Relevant xkcd

Edit: though obviously for most use cases it shouldn’t matter

I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.

Honestly, even though as a consumer I don’t like it, I don’t mind it that much. Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”. There needs to be a balance.

Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn’t interact with anything and can’t be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.

I’m almost afraid to ask… How much?

Did someone actually build this?

Try this: https://superuser.com/a/1726367

Notes:

• I haven’t tried it myself
• (step 6) In Mint, instead of using the terminal, open that directory normally in the file manager, then right-click on an empty part of the directory and choose “open as root”. Both the file manager and the default text editor after you’ve opened the file will show red banners reminding you that they are running as root.
• (steps 3-4) I hope you are at least a little familiar with the registry editor on windows, otherwise these steps might be hard to follow