Nothing you wrote contradicts the observation that it’s easier to apply for a job and get it than to construct a full blown company which needs to be acquired. If there are already 99 ‘spies’ at Google, there’s hardly need for such elaborate schemes.

Why do you think it would affect performance?

It’s easier to get operatives to apply for a job and get hired than build a company which ends up being bought. This sounds like conspiracy theory to me. Any large US corporation likely has operatives of various countries working for it.

You cannot write setuid scripts. It must be a binary.

The thread linked by the OP is Jarkko Sakkinen (kernel maintainer) seemingly saying “show your work, your patch is full of nonsense” in a patch submitted for review to the Linux kernel.

That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying: ‘You’re using terms which aren’t that familiar to everyone. Could you explain them?’

If you have an SVG image you can either embed it directly on the website, or link it using img tag. Whatever the case, there’s no need to export it to PNG.

And yes, that will likely result in a smaller website and furthermore images which can scale smoothly.

Another interesting part is that HTML5 supports embedding SVG. That is, you can put SVG code directly in your HTML5 document and it’s going to render correctly. You can also style it through your website’s CSS file and manipulate the elements via JavaScript.

Though as others pointed out, it’s technically not HTML but XML.

Which is why I haven’t wrote ‘EOF character’, ‘EOT’ or ‘EOT character’. Neither have I claimed that \x4 character is interpreted by the shell as end of file.

Edit: Actually, I did say ‘EOF character’ originally (though I still haven’t claimed that it sends EOF character to the program). I’ve updated the comment to clear things up more.

Having to type sudo already acts as a molly-guard. Whatever OP wants to do I won’t stop them, but they are doing something strange.

Sure, though I advise against it. The following C program can do that:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
	if (argc < 2) {
		fprintf(stderr, "usage: %s <command> <args>...", argv[0]);
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}

	printf("Executing");
	for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i) {
		printf(" %s", argv[i]);
	}
	puts("\nPress ^C to abort.");
	sleep(5);

	if (setuid(0)) {
		perror("setuid");
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}

	execvp(argv[1], argv + 1);
	perror(argv[1]);
	return EXIT_FAILURE;
}

As seen in:

$ gcc -O2 -o delay-su delay-su.c
$ sudo chown root:sudo delay-su
$ sudo chmod 4750 delay-su
$ ./delay-su id
$ id -u
1000
$ ./delay-su id -u
Executing id -u
^C to abort
0

This will allow anyone in group sudo to execute any command as root. You may change the group to something else to control who exactly can run the program (you cannot change the user of the program).

If there’s some specific command you want to run, it’s better to hard-code it or configure sudo to allow execution of that command without password.

It’s not. You keep insisting that ^D doesn’t send EOF and yet:

$ stty -a | grep eof
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
$ man stty |grep -A1 eof |head -n2
       eof CHAR
              CHAR will send an end of file (terminate the input)

^D (which is an ASCII EOT character) signals EOF. The thing is that in C every line of a text file must be terminated by a new-line. And so, when you end a file with ^D without a return, you get funky results.

If you go with adding a passphrase to the drive keep in mind that if it’s a unique one you may end up forgetting it since you won’t normally be using it. Even if you set it to the same passphrase as root partition, if you ever change passphrase for root you might forget to change home passphrase.

I would probably just make a physical copy of the key file. It’s just 32 bytes (no, larger key file doesn’t make things any more secure) so you can hexdump -C it and copy the key on a piece of paper.

Mint is fine. Rather than changing distros, rather keep using it and configuring it the way you want it. For the most part, GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux and many popular distributions are largely the same.

This is too simplistic example to give any meaningful answer. What’s Type? What’s value? If it’s i32 and 42 than they both compile to the exact same thing. But if Type is Drop than the second will call the destructor on each iteration. (I’ve also written previously about similar example with BorrowedBuf¹).