bct

> The only one I've seen is the gartner snake but here in Edmonton it is just a little bigger than an earthworm.

That might just be because Edmonton has lots of enormous dew worms :)

There are bigger garter snakes around - I live just outside Edmonton and see them pretty frequently. I hear there are plenty of rattlesnakes in southern Alberta too.

You can do a lot worse than ACH. It's hard to read, but it's simple and pretty well-defined.

What _really_ sucks is one-off fixed-width formats that aren't well defined, or that change suddenly (oh, you thought that field would always be populated? lol no.)

Even calling it archaic is too harsh. Granted, the batch-centric nature is not ideal (and it's hard to imagine a system with this kind of latency built in being designed today), but if you're designing a system based on batch processing then shipping files over SFTP is a pretty reasonable way to do it.

We know how to build protocols for federated systems - there must be at least a dozen serious efforts at federated social media by now.

What we don't know (or what we've forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.

In addition to what everyone else said there are big regional effects: in North America cardholders have often never seen 3D Secure before, they don't know their passwords, and issuers don't care enough to make their authentication pages usable.

But in France and the UK it's pretty standard; cardholders are used to it, and issuers make an effort to decide whether it's worth requiring authentication.

It's not a lightning bolt, it's the rune ᛋ.

The XML serialization Apple defined for plists is awful and not easy to query with XPath.

> If DRM requires a non-standard plugin, and plugins themselves become increasingly verboten

The unstated assumption here is that DRM that isn't a standard won't be built into a browser.

I'm pretty happy having a powerless figurehead, especially if the alternative is presidential elections.

Browsers should e.g. allow tables to be sorted by clicking column headers. They can't, because tables aren't always tables.

> Like, why do we still use plain text in flat files for source code

Information density. Images and graphs are exceptions to the general rule that text can contain a lot more information on one page than graphics can.