... whenever they really describe the size of a buffer that fits in memory, or
of a block file (which is never now more than a megabyte and so could be fit in
memory all at once), or a part thereof.
... And in some places where a library uses signed types, assert that
the reported number is not negative.
What led me to this, is that there are many places where a size_t value for
an allocation is the product of a number of channels and some other number.
