Depends on where you are in the U.S. Some places have extreme renter protections. Tenants can refuse to pay rent for months before you can even start an eviction proceeding. Then it takes months more. E.g. New York. https://www.reddit.com/r/Landlord/comments/15nn6o0/landlordu.... Landlords may forgo six months of back rent just to get the tenant out of the unit.
Meanwhile in Alabama the only recourse you have against a landowner who rents you something not habitable is to move out. American law generally is very bad at compelling a party to uphold a contract.
Real question: Do landlords resort to "hired help" to encourage non-paying tenants to leave more quickly? Two years sounds crazy. Many people who only own a second home for rent might go bankrupt without rent to pay the loan.
In Poland, they sometimes do. For example, they rent the property to another person (they claim that it’s legal), who is a goon. The goon moves in with the original renter, and makes his life hell. Other paths are to disconnect electricity from the property, by cancelling the contract with electric provider. However, some people are ok with living without power, if the apartment is free. Next steps are - disconnecting water and/or heating, although these are less legal than disconnecting power.
There also was a tragic case of an older lady who resisted being evicted from a building in Warsaw bought by a new owner, who in turn kidnapped her, drove to city outskirts and burned her alive to get rid of her.
> Instead of doing the shebang line, it has to traverse the filesystem to resolve the link. I suspect that’s probably more expensive than parsing the shebang line.
I highly doubt that. Path traversal is one of the most optimized pieces of code in the Linux kernel, especially for commonly accessed places like /bin where everything is most likely already in the dentry cache. For the script with a shebang on the other hand it first has to read it from disk (or the page cache), then parse the path from it, and then do a path traversal anyway to find the referenced file.
Does that mean that in your country, the day is considered to start at 1:00 AM rather than midnight? That choice is very strange when combined with the choice to call midnight "0:00" rather than "12:00 PM".
No, we just don't use AM/PM. In written language, the 24 hour format is used exclusively. When the 12 hour format is used in spoken language, we either leave it out entirely when clear from context, or use "in the morning" vs "in the evening".
So noon is "12 in the morning", which is an hour after "11 in the morning"; and midnight is "12 in the evening", which is an hour after "11 in the evening".
That's not really compatible with your comment about the US. By your own description, you do exactly the same thing that the US does,† but it's only strange when the US does it?
† That is, you follow 11:00 PM with 12:00 AM, and you don't actually refer to "AM" or "PM". Both of those are normal US practice. You are different in the use of 24-hour formats in writing, but that has no bearing on the question of whether the hour following 11 PM is 12 AM; you just assured me that that's true in both countries.
Past/future does matter, as generally speaking it's possible to accurately convert between local time and UTC for times in the past, but not in the future.
There's a few exceptions where governments have retroactively changed timezones or DST rules, but at that point you've lost anyway.
You can't accurately convert future local times to UTC timestamps yet, as that conversion changes when timezones change.
Let's say we schedule a meeting for next year at 15:00 local time in SF. You store that as an UTC timestamp of 2025-08-24 22:00 and America/Los_Angeles timezone. Now, imagine California decides to abolish daylight savings time and stay on UTC-8 next year. Our meeting time, agreed upon in local time, is now actually for 23:00 UTC.
Wow thanks for sharing this, this certainly is a use case not covered by the system I proposed. I imagine this will require versioning of the timezone so we can translate our America/Los_Angeles v1.0 timestamp to America/Los_Angeles v2.0.
> a vertical array of distinctive marks (e.g. rapidly blinking LEDs)
This doesn't work, as light beams diverge. Even taking a high-quality laser beam with a divergence of 0.1 milliradian (for comparison, a typical laser pointer is about 1-2 mrad), after crossing the 11 meters width of a 9-lane athletics track, you end up with a beam diameter of 2.2 millimeters. At the 10 m/s speed of the athletes and a 40000 fps framerate, they travel 250 micrometers between each frame.
I'm not sure what the issue you're describing is. If I have two devices, each with a camera and a line of marks, if they can each see each other's marks, then they are aligned to within the horizontal spread of the camera pixels. There are no lasers involved -- the marks can be paint, stickers, blinking wide-angle LEDs, etc. -- my suggestion to use blinking LEDs is just so that's it's more obvious when one is in the field of view of the camera.
You don't just need the cameras to see each other, you need them to be perfectly parallel to each other as well, as otherwise they're photographing along a different plane, which may give conflicting results.
Suppose camera A has line L_A on the camera. A’s optics and marks are both on L_A, so A’s image plane contains L_A and camera B’s image plane also contains L_A (you know the latter because you’ve aligned the cameras so camera B sees L_A). And vice versa: camera A sees L_B. In 3D Euclidean space, two distinct lines define a plane, and both camera’s are photographing planes that contain L_A and L_B, so both cameras are photographing the same plane.
More concretely, if the cameras are photographing along different but parallel planes, then they won’t see each other.
Your solution works in a geometric world, where light propagates in a perfect straight line of infinitesimally small width. That's not true in reality, where light propagates in an ever-expanding cone.
More concretely, you can have two cameras photographing along different but parallel planes that do see each other.
The necessary data rate for these photo finish cameras isn't actually that high, because every "frame" is only 1 pixel wide. If the photo is 10000 pixels high, you need a datarate of about 10 Gbit/s at 40000 fps and 24 bits/pixel. RAM is plenty fast enough for that.
Regular high-speed cameras that shoot a video are a whole other story, though.
> I also think that a .pseudo TLD should be made up which also cannot be assigned on the internet, but is also not for assigning on local networks either.
There's already .example, .invalid, .test and .localhost; which are reserved. What usecase do you have that's not covered by one of them?
.example is used for examples in documentation and stuff like that.
.invalid means that a domain name is required but a valid name should not be used; for example, a false email address in a "From:" header in Usenet, to indicate that you cannot send email to the author in this way.
.test is for a internal testing use, of DNS and other stuff.
.localhost is for identifying the local computer.
.internal is (presumably) for internal use in your own computer and local network, when you want to assign domain names that are for internal use only.
.pseudo is for other cases that do not fit any of the above, when a pseudo-TLD which is not used as a usual domain name, is required for a specialized use by a application, operating system, etc. You can then assign subdomains of .pseudo for specific kind of specialized uses (these assignments will be specific to the application or otherwise). Some programs might treat .pseudo (or some of its subdomains) as a special case, or might be able to be configured to do so.
(One example of .pseudo might be if you want to require a program to use only version 4 internet or only version 6 internet, and where this must be specified in the domain name for some reason; the system or a proxy server can then handle it as a special case. Other examples might be in some cases, error simulations, non-TCP/IP networks, specialized types of logging or access restrictions, etc. Some of these things do not always need to be specified as a domain name; but, in some cases they do, and in such cases then it is helpful to do so.)
I'm not following; the examples you're giving for .pseudo sound like they would fit under .internal. Could you give a more concrete example of a usecase?
In the USA. Many countries in Europe have renters protection similar to that of mortgage holders.