Killing Khamenei would be a bad move. That’s how martyrs are made, and they are already dialed up to 11 in Iran, so there is no reason to pour even more oil in the fire.

I am not sure this is sarcastic. I would not be surprised if this was a real product, used to abuse a child in the US. Americans are that kind of crazy.

Time to head for greener pastures.

We had a situation where the banks forced us to split into two companies. Our part would be a new-formed company under a previous department manager. Our choice was to join the new company or let go. So I told the CEO that I would like to work in the new company, but if he would give us that guy as a boss, we’d be bankrupt in two or three months. Most of my coworkers told him about the same.

Handbrakes were applied to the process, the company owner was called, he talked to us, too, and called in a general staff assembly to tell us that the original candidate would not be available for the role of CEO for “health reasons”. We got split off with a different CEO, and since then we are prospering like never before.

Well, at least we can close the airports and harbours to Americans. And as COVID has shown, we are well capable to brew our own, successful vaccines.

The idea probably came to him while golfing.

I hope they rot.

Bitch fight! Bikini mud wrestling!

Yes, this works with most stickers, but there are some tough bastards that even resist that.

My wife and I had booked a hotel with “shower en suite”. We assumed that this meant that the hotel rooms bathroom had a shower instead e.g. a tub.

Nope. In the middle of the room, there was a plastic booth not unlike those portable toilets you can find at festivals. This was the shower. You had to drop in coins to get warm water in the shower.

There was no bathroom as such. A common toilet was half the stairs down from the room, and it ran out of toilet paper on the weekend.

The breakfast was rather spartan, a lot of “either this or that, but not both” selections.

This was very emberrasing for our friends who had recommended that place (and helped us with a roll of toilet paper). They had been in that hotel some 30 or 40 years before, when it still had style…

Do they plan to make Red Bull?

The reader should mount as a USB drive, you put files on it like epub, PDF, or HTML in your own directory structure, and you can browse this and read the files. Nothing else needed.

Maybe with one subplot coming up occasionally that simply cannot be explained rationally, which drives Scully mad.

Like those weekdays where he goes golfing?

Remember the ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times”…

The compressing and renumbering seems to be more common with embedded Chinese fonts - Space-wise it makes a lot of sense. But yes, mark and copy text, paste it into word or writer, and you get gibberish. Can’t verify the search, though. And, of course, Google translate can’t do anything with it, either.

If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.

It is not a curse. It does exactly what it is intended to do: Create an archive of a document that is universally reproduceable.

It is a very well designed cul-de-sac for exactly this purpose. Using it for anything else is calling for trouble.

The problem lies in the PDFs themselves. In there are objects that represent lines of glyphs. If you are lucky. A conversion tool can guess which of those lines belong together and produce the text.

It cannot know any intentions behind it, though. Take a numbered list. The first line is two line objects: the number plus the . or the ), and the first line of text. The conversion tool can now guess. As the line blocks with the numbers are all left of the line blocks with text, this could be a numbered list. Or it could be a table with two columns. Nothing in the PDF is giving any hints.

And that is the easy part. This assumes that the document either uses default fonts, or keeps its embedded fonts untouched. If they use embedded fonts and a PDF optimizer that only embeds the used characters and renumbers them, any copy or conversion tool is bound to fail.

Same with protected PDFs where you simply cannot copy the text from the start.

And then there are PDFs that just consist of scanned pages. Here you would need an OCR software to get something readable out of them.

PDF is an archival, output format, the end of a process. Not something to work from.

Always preserve the original file. Keep it safe. If you change tools, make sure you have a conversion path into something editable. The PDF is for giving away, nothing else.

Tough getting a spoon of their own medicine. Although the mullahs claim they were actually targeting something nearby, while the IDF just claims every hospital, school, or whatever to be Hamas HQ.