zsh plug: Recursive file completion
on
From Bash To Z Shell
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A good chart, but it omits the single feature which for me puts zsh head and shoulders over the others: recursive globbing.
I used to find myself using find a lot -- mostly for handling files in subdirectories, and/or for selecting files based on metadata of various kinds. But zsh makes find almost totally unnecessary: it has a simple but very powerful syntax which extends the simple '*' and '?' file completion to allow selection by size/date/type/&c, exclusion lists, user-specified ordering, and most usefully it can select files in subdirectories too. And because it's right there in the shell, the results are easy to use without that awkward -exec syntax. I don't think I've used find once since switching to zsh!
I really don't understand why it hasn't become more popular. It's free and open source; it can mimic other shells (notably, ksh), and it ships with systems such as Mac OS X.
You can code that stupid bug just as easily with the brace on the same line; just put the semicolon before the brace!
Seriously, putting the brace on the same line may (or may not) save a line of space, but you can't visually check the braces. With the brace on a new line, the opening and closing brace match up neatly, and make the structure much, much clearer. And it removes a whole bunch of bugs when code isn't in the block you thought it was.
And anyway, you don't need to waste a whole line. I'd write that code as:
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{___// loop body
____//...
____//...
}
which I find clear, logical and compact.
(Except with spaces instead of underscores, of course. Is there any way to get proper formatting past/.'s lame HTML subset?)
Time and effort maintaining web servers? Risk of lawsuits from breaching copyright, if they're not careful? Time and effort spent tracing down authorship and rights? Reputation and competitive advantage if there's a problem with any drivers? Time and effort in cleaning up the code ready for release? (Identifying and removing libellous comments, trade secrets, &c.) Time and effort, perhaps, in supporting said code?
Of course, I wouldn't expect any of these to be particularly colossal investments, but it's not going to be quite as simple a matter as you paint it.
I recently installed Wikipedia on my Psion 5mx. It's only a snapshot, omits pictures and other multimedia files, and takes up nearly half a GB of CompactFlash, but it's complete and unedited, and perfectly usable. (As the significant reduction in my free time shows...)
's nothing new. I helped a friend build a working laser harp back when I was at school (in the late '80s).
We bought a helium-neon laser (this was when they were new), used an array of microscope slides to split the beam into 8, set up a large frame with 8 optical sensors mounted at the top, lined it all up, and fed the signals into a BBC Micro's parallel port, which then triggered a Music 500 synth module.
It wasn't terribly bright, and we had to use a smoke machine to make it more visible, but it worked. (Which is more than JMJ's later ones did!)
Personally, I'd consider that to be less important, for the simple reason that the Finder is replaceable. Other people can (and have) written other file-desktop apps which you could run instead of Finder. Whereas the core bits of the OS aren't so easy to swap out.
Anyway, isn't calling Finder a 'piece of crap' putting it a little strongly? I'm still running 10.2, and although the Finder's not perfect (it doesn't like folders with hundreds of files, it doesn't handle external servers well, and the three views aren't quite consistent) it's still perfectly usable and most of it is pretty good.
I find it interesting just how many future histories (the Star Trek backstory and Clarke's Odyssey sequence spring to mind first) have mankind 'growing out of' war and tribal/national conflict. Some show it as a natural wising-up, others as the result of some internal (nuclear holocaust) or external (alien intervention) catastrophe. But it implies that a humanity still susceptible to war and conflict couldn't successfully maintain extraterrestrial colonies.
After all, we often find life fragile and risky here, where the temperature, pressure, gravity, atmosphere, and availability of water stay pretty close to optimal. We could colonise many more Earth habitats (e.g. desolate regions of land, cities floating on or below the sea) much easier than those in space or on other planets -- and yet we don't. Or can't. Surely similar arguments apply to those first?
If Tridge's tool is out there we are now supporting our code and his code. We couldn't do that.
In other words: this, like most of the disagreements over DRM, trademarks, domain-squatting, copyright, and even software licensing, isn't really about freedom. It's not really about cost, or about 'stealing' someone's work. It's about control.
If Larry's client is the only one that can connect to the BK servers, then he has full control over the system as a whole. If other clients can connect as well, then he loses that control.
Now, whether you think that control is a Good Thing(tm) or not is another matter. I haven't been following the story, and I don't know the details, so I have no firm opinion.
Try looking at it from Larry's point of view. AIUI, at present, if there's a problem with BK, then he's responsible. It's down to him to fix software, get new clients out there, fix corruption in the DBs, &c &c. And where that's down to mistakes in his own code, then that seems fair enough -- especially when people have paid him money for the privilege.
But if other clients can connect, then that opens up whole areas of problems for which he could not be responsible. How could it be fair to expect him to invest time and money in sorting out problems caused by third-party code? Especially when he'd be incapable of fixing said code, or even from preventing it being used?
OTOH, I can also see the users' point of view, where huge amounts of data, time and effort are invested in a system with no guaranteed future, no way to fix mistakes or make improvements themselves. That's not a good long-term investment. But was this a good response to the situation?
Maybe the Right Thing to do would be to ignore the BK protocols (regardless of whether it's okay to reverse-engineer them, or to connect to a such a closed system). The moral high ground would be to ensure some way of getting all the information out of BK DBs (which I gather McVoy was going to provide), and then write a free tool, servers and clients, to do the same job -- with its own, separate protocols. But it looks like it's too late for that now...
My own ill-informed opinion, FWIW, is that while Tridge's efforts were probably legal (and rightly so), they weren't helpful or prudent.
It would mean that, for example, pages that are vandalised would remain so for at least that period of time. It would also slow down the editing process drastically -- and as it's that process which makes Wikipedia what it is and is responsible for its phenomenal growth, such a slowdown would pretty much emasculate it.
There are many sorts of influence. I think that the most obvious one (that over the content of articles, especially those directly concerning a sponsor) is the least likely, because it would be relatively easy to spot and fix.
What worries me is that both sponsors are in the same business; that of providing access to information. And I think that's where a more insidious type of influence might lie. What if, for example, Google got to see new articles immediately, but the rest of us had to wait for a few minutes, or even hours? What if there were new types of article that were only available via Yahoo? What if the wikilink format was changed slightly to allow Google to easier search and rank pages, at the cost of searches directly or via Yahoo? I'm sure you can think of other ways that a sponsor could profit from providing and hence controlling access to Wikipedia.
Prohibiting forking is against the spirit of the GPL. Part of the beauty of open source is that you CAN fork a project to give it your unique features...
Mmm. Though the ironic result of this is that because you can fork, it encourages the developers to be responsive enough that no-one wants to fork it!
Re: Free thought is a challenge to authority!
on
EZTree Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
More than that -- the language will change so that you won't be able even to express the concept of downloading music. If you can't think it, you can't do it.
Where Orwell got it wrong was in imagining that the language would change by inventing new words and removing old ones. Instead, we're seeing a much more subtle and insidious change where existing words alter their meanings.
For example, to most people the word 'P2P' now has connotations of illegality, hacking, risk, &c. It's already difficult to speak of P2P as having legal, moral and beneficial uses. When it gets to be synonymous with 'crime', then the RIAA's job will be half done.
Credit where it's due; my ISP is V21, and I've always got straight through to a tech who a) knows what they're talking about, b) takes time to solve the problem, and c) doesn't mind that I'm using an unsupported OS (Mac OS X) and modem (ADSL router, not the supplied ADSL modem).
Not that I have very many problems, and they're usually my fault. Last time it was DNS -- not knowing any better, I'd told my Mac their DNS addresses manually. A couple of times, they've changed, leaving me in trouble. (I know enough to tell that the net connection is okay and that it's just the DNS.) One time, the tech remotely logged into his home machine to make sure of the DNS address! The last time, the guy pointed out that my router would get the DNS addresses automatically anyway. I just turned on DNSRelay in the router, told the Mac to use that for DNS, and now it all works as it should.
The point is that V21 has great tech support; I wish more companies did!
(Maybe my attitude helps; I try to be calm, friendly, precise, and attentive; and it's probably clear that I'm a techie myself, even if not in precisely the same area. Plus I don't take my frustration out on the person I'm talking to -- well, not without extreme provocation!)
they'll get the people to eventually accept a National Identity Card so everywhere you go... can be tracked.
Look: you know that's a Bad Thing. I know that's a Bad Thing. But it's hard to explain in simple terms to any of the sheeple out there just how dangerous that would be.
"It helps catch terrorists. If you're not a terrorist, what have you got to worry about?" they say. Because they don't have the capacity for abstract thought, it doesn't occur to them that you could have something to hide which is perfectly legal and even perfectly moral. Any scenarios you put to them get dismissed as impossible. Even the thought that a law enforcement officer could be anything other than perfect is incomprehensible...
So how do you explain just what a Bad Thing that would be?
I have a big library (~3 bookcases' worth of novels, short stories, &c) on my Psion 5mx, and even on its 640x240, 5.5"x2" screen, I find reading novels perfectly comfortable. It's true you need to 'turn the page' more often than a dead-tree book, but when that just involves pressing the space bar or tapping the screen, it's really not an issue. You can choose font and size, of course, and with the backlight you can read in bed with the lights off!
Of course, a very small screen, such as on my current mobile (Siemens S45, about 1" square) would make reading an extremely tedious experience, but when you reach the 5mx's sort of size, once you get engrossed in a story you really don't notice the screen. Or at least, I don't!
It's a matter of personal taste, I'm sure. But don't knock it until you've tried it!
But IMO the issue isn't really electronic vs visual ID. The issue is electronic vs human reading of that ID.
Up till relatively recently, a numberplate could be read by any human, but not by an automated machine. So it could be easily checked when really necessary (e.g. when stopped by the police, when photographed leaving a petrol station without paying, when photographed by a speeding camera, &c). But it wasn't checked as a matter of routine.
Now, though, there are machines which can look at a numberplate and automatically recognise the vehicle ID. And there are RFID chips which can be automatically read by machine. Both of these have a similar effect: car IDs can be read as a matter of course, and checked against whatever information they want to.
Arguably, when used to stop cars which have no tax or insurance, that could be beneficial. But would you want your husband/wife to be able to subpoena records of all your movements in a divorce case, say? ("You claimed to have been working late at the office, but your car was recorded as having driven to your girlfriend's house at 5.27pm that evening!") And if the system is widely used, how easy might it be for people to gain unauthorised access? You have only to look at any detective novel to see how people can have good, legitimate reasons for wanting to conceal their movements. And it'd be a gift for stalkers and paparazzi...
Here in the UK, we already have automated numberplate recognition, not just for speed cameras and red-light cameras, but also for the recognising cars entering the London congestion zone, and sending out appropriate bills. (And I gather there's a good number of people who were billed incorrectly...) There's also a new type of speed camera, which recognises your numberplate as you pass fixed locations on motorways, and issues a speeding ticket if your average speed between two such points exceeds the limit. (Which is fair, but worrying for the privacy implications.)
So yes, I agree with your conclusion that RFID doesn't seem to have any intrinsic dangers over and above those which are here already...
Re: 56 april fools in one day
on
EU to Ban Macs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, but isn't the whole point of April Fool's to, like, you know, fool people?
One subtle and clever hoax amongst four or five genuine articles may fool many people, and bring real pleasure to the rest. But five obvious and poorly-done hoaxes out of five isn't even going to fool my cat. (And it's not even a particularly clever cat...)
If you can tell it's a hoax from the title, it's not written very well. The best hoaxes start off completely plausibly, and become more bizarre slowly, so only by the end do you realise you've been fooled.
(But, hey, who reads the whole article, let alone the link, so we'd better fit the whole hoax into 10 words of title, huh?)
Actually, one idea I haven't heard of anyone implementing is to make use of the source of information that's easiest for them to gather: the links people click on from Google's site. If everyone who enters a particular search term clicks only on one particular link, then they should make it the first result; and so on.
Not a perfect method, by any means, but it does look as if it'll bias the sort to show the pages that people actually want to see. Combined with their other ranking methods, maybe it would help to improve their ordering? Or has this been tried?
Also, unicode domains are a horrible idea. Much as people may love being able to use locale-specific characters in the domains it doesn't help the rest of the world who wants to keep the internet useable.
Erm, it's the 'rest of the world' that wants to use their own characters!
If you look at a map of the world, we native English-speakers aren't in any sort of majority... How would you like, for example, being restricted to the first 20 letters, and having to misspell your domain names to work around the rest?
She was an integral member of the Radiophonic Workshop during its golden age, creating theme tunes and background music for many radio and TV programmes. She worked with some specialist studios, with classical composers Maxwell Davies, Gerhard, Berio, and Stockhausen, and with other musicians such as Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, and was also involved with film soundtracks. In the 1970s, she retired from music to work in a bookshop, an art gallery and a museum. She died in 2001.
The most interesting work I have of hers is 1969's White Noise - An Electric Storm. She formed White Noise with David Vorhaus, and along with Brian Hodgson (also from the Radiophonic Workshop) created a bizarre, psychedelic, mostly electronic pop record, full of strange noises, quirky tunes, humour, and genuinely frightening sounds. Not easy to listen to, but well worth the effort.
Erm... It's not a song, because it's not sung! It's a piece of music.
But yes, it's amazing. It's a shame that Ron Grainer gets the only credit for it, because although he wrote the basic tune, Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop did the arrangement and recording, and so much of what we remember it for was down to her. A real unsung pioneer.
And the new version strikes a good balance between keeping all that made the original great (including several actual samples from it) and making it modern too. (Far better than that ghastly orchestral version from the TV movie...)
Back on topic, it's interesting to look at the circumstances of the different actors leaving the series. After 3 years, William Hartnell was suffering ill health, and so the first regeneration was forced on the programme. Patrick Troughton chose to leave after 3 years -- for fear of typecasting. Jon Pertwee left after 4.5 years (possible reasons include the BBC's unwillingness to raise his salary, and also much of the production team moving on). Tom Baker had the longest run at 7 years. (Maybe the typecasting argument was valid in his case -- it was a while before he was in demand again.) Peter Davison had been advised to leave after 3 years by Patrick Troughton; when the time came, he found himself regretting the decision, but it was too late to change his mind. Colin Baker was forced out by the Controller of BBC1 after only 2 years. And Sylvester McCoy had only 2 years in the role before the series was cancelled.
So, so far no-one's left voluntarily after less than 3 years. And out of the 4 actors did leave voluntarily, only the longest-serving one seemed to suffer from typecasting -- and although another two mentioned it as a reason for leaving, one later regretted it. And that was after being in the role for 3 times as long as Eccleston has so far...
Given the range of parts and exposure he's had so far, I very very much doubt Eccleston is in any immediate danger of suffering that way. But given the number of times he's used the past tense in interviews about the series, I suspect that it's more than just a negotiating tactic on his part...:-(
If this case ever comes to court (and I hope it does), it won't be a case of GPL infringement; it'll be a case of copyright infringement.
If they can show that PearPC's code is being distributed, then CherryOS need to show that they have the right to do so. The GPL doesn't give them that right, because they're clearly not abiding by it. So the question is, what else gives them that right? The answer is: nothing. They don't have that right. So they're illegally copying and distributing copyright material: clear breach of copyright. (At least, that's how it appears to me, though IANAL of course.)
That's the point of the GPL -- it's constructed on top of copyright law, which is a rather solid foundation.
So a court case wouldn't directly confirm the validity of the GPL. (The defendant would still be up a certain creek even if the GPL happened to be invalid.) Still, it could certainly improve public perception of it, which would be no bad thing.
Yes... apparently, they've grown a second pair of legs.
(For the literature- and irony-impaired, that's a reference to the slogan 'Four legs good, two legs bad' in Orwell's Animal Farm. As used to control the sheep, which were incapable of thinking for themselves and needed something simplistic and catchy for their opinions. I'll leave you to draw the present-day parallels yourselves.)
Slashdot Mirror
I used to find myself using find a lot -- mostly for handling files in subdirectories, and/or for selecting files based on metadata of various kinds. But zsh makes find almost totally unnecessary: it has a simple but very powerful syntax which extends the simple '*' and '?' file completion to allow selection by size/date/type/&c, exclusion lists, user-specified ordering, and most usefully it can select files in subdirectories too. And because it's right there in the shell, the results are easy to use without that awkward -exec syntax. I don't think I've used find once since switching to zsh!
I really don't understand why it hasn't become more popular. It's free and open source; it can mimic other shells (notably, ksh), and it ships with systems such as Mac OS X.
Seriously, putting the brace on the same line may (or may not) save a line of space, but you can't visually check the braces. With the brace on a new line, the opening and closing brace match up neatly, and make the structure much, much clearer. And it removes a whole bunch of bugs when code isn't in the block you thought it was.
And anyway, you don't need to waste a whole line. I'd write that code as:
which I find clear, logical and compact.(Except with spaces instead of underscores, of course. Is there any way to get proper formatting past /.'s lame HTML subset?)
OTTOMH: time? Effort?
Time and effort maintaining web servers? Risk of lawsuits from breaching copyright, if they're not careful? Time and effort spent tracing down authorship and rights? Reputation and competitive advantage if there's a problem with any drivers? Time and effort in cleaning up the code ready for release? (Identifying and removing libellous comments, trade secrets, &c.) Time and effort, perhaps, in supporting said code?
Of course, I wouldn't expect any of these to be particularly colossal investments, but it's not going to be quite as simple a matter as you paint it.
I recently installed Wikipedia on my Psion 5mx. It's only a snapshot, omits pictures and other multimedia files, and takes up nearly half a GB of CompactFlash, but it's complete and unedited, and perfectly usable. (As the significant reduction in my free time shows...)
We bought a helium-neon laser (this was when they were new), used an array of microscope slides to split the beam into 8, set up a large frame with 8 optical sensors mounted at the top, lined it all up, and fed the signals into a BBC Micro's parallel port, which then triggered a Music 500 synth module.
It wasn't terribly bright, and we had to use a smoke machine to make it more visible, but it worked. (Which is more than JMJ's later ones did!)
Happy days...
Anyway, isn't calling Finder a 'piece of crap' putting it a little strongly? I'm still running 10.2, and although the Finder's not perfect (it doesn't like folders with hundreds of files, it doesn't handle external servers well, and the three views aren't quite consistent) it's still perfectly usable and most of it is pretty good.
[NT]
I find it interesting just how many future histories (the Star Trek backstory and Clarke's Odyssey sequence spring to mind first) have mankind 'growing out of' war and tribal/national conflict. Some show it as a natural wising-up, others as the result of some internal (nuclear holocaust) or external (alien intervention) catastrophe. But it implies that a humanity still susceptible to war and conflict couldn't successfully maintain extraterrestrial colonies.
After all, we often find life fragile and risky here, where the temperature, pressure, gravity, atmosphere, and availability of water stay pretty close to optimal. We could colonise many more Earth habitats (e.g. desolate regions of land, cities floating on or below the sea) much easier than those in space or on other planets -- and yet we don't. Or can't. Surely similar arguments apply to those first?
In other words: this, like most of the disagreements over DRM, trademarks, domain-squatting, copyright, and even software licensing, isn't really about freedom. It's not really about cost, or about 'stealing' someone's work. It's about control.
If Larry's client is the only one that can connect to the BK servers, then he has full control over the system as a whole. If other clients can connect as well, then he loses that control.
Now, whether you think that control is a Good Thing(tm) or not is another matter. I haven't been following the story, and I don't know the details, so I have no firm opinion.
Try looking at it from Larry's point of view. AIUI, at present, if there's a problem with BK, then he's responsible. It's down to him to fix software, get new clients out there, fix corruption in the DBs, &c &c. And where that's down to mistakes in his own code, then that seems fair enough -- especially when people have paid him money for the privilege.
But if other clients can connect, then that opens up whole areas of problems for which he could not be responsible. How could it be fair to expect him to invest time and money in sorting out problems caused by third-party code? Especially when he'd be incapable of fixing said code, or even from preventing it being used?
OTOH, I can also see the users' point of view, where huge amounts of data, time and effort are invested in a system with no guaranteed future, no way to fix mistakes or make improvements themselves. That's not a good long-term investment. But was this a good response to the situation?
Maybe the Right Thing to do would be to ignore the BK protocols (regardless of whether it's okay to reverse-engineer them, or to connect to a such a closed system). The moral high ground would be to ensure some way of getting all the information out of BK DBs (which I gather McVoy was going to provide), and then write a free tool, servers and clients, to do the same job -- with its own, separate protocols. But it looks like it's too late for that now...
My own ill-informed opinion, FWIW, is that while Tridge's efforts were probably legal (and rightly so), they weren't helpful or prudent.
There must be an award somewhere for people who Just Don't Get It...
It would mean that, for example, pages that are vandalised would remain so for at least that period of time. It would also slow down the editing process drastically -- and as it's that process which makes Wikipedia what it is and is responsible for its phenomenal growth, such a slowdown would pretty much emasculate it.
What worries me is that both sponsors are in the same business; that of providing access to information. And I think that's where a more insidious type of influence might lie. What if, for example, Google got to see new articles immediately, but the rest of us had to wait for a few minutes, or even hours? What if there were new types of article that were only available via Yahoo? What if the wikilink format was changed slightly to allow Google to easier search and rank pages, at the cost of searches directly or via Yahoo? I'm sure you can think of other ways that a sponsor could profit from providing and hence controlling access to Wikipedia.
Mmm. Though the ironic result of this is that because you can fork, it encourages the developers to be responsive enough that no-one wants to fork it!
Where Orwell got it wrong was in imagining that the language would change by inventing new words and removing old ones. Instead, we're seeing a much more subtle and insidious change where existing words alter their meanings.
For example, to most people the word 'P2P' now has connotations of illegality, hacking, risk, &c. It's already difficult to speak of P2P as having legal, moral and beneficial uses. When it gets to be synonymous with 'crime', then the RIAA's job will be half done.
Not that I have very many problems, and they're usually my fault. Last time it was DNS -- not knowing any better, I'd told my Mac their DNS addresses manually. A couple of times, they've changed, leaving me in trouble. (I know enough to tell that the net connection is okay and that it's just the DNS.) One time, the tech remotely logged into his home machine to make sure of the DNS address! The last time, the guy pointed out that my router would get the DNS addresses automatically anyway. I just turned on DNSRelay in the router, told the Mac to use that for DNS, and now it all works as it should.
The point is that V21 has great tech support; I wish more companies did!
(Maybe my attitude helps; I try to be calm, friendly, precise, and attentive; and it's probably clear that I'm a techie myself, even if not in precisely the same area. Plus I don't take my frustration out on the person I'm talking to -- well, not without extreme provocation!)
Look: you know that's a Bad Thing. I know that's a Bad Thing. But it's hard to explain in simple terms to any of the sheeple out there just how dangerous that would be.
"It helps catch terrorists. If you're not a terrorist, what have you got to worry about?" they say. Because they don't have the capacity for abstract thought, it doesn't occur to them that you could have something to hide which is perfectly legal and even perfectly moral. Any scenarios you put to them get dismissed as impossible. Even the thought that a law enforcement officer could be anything other than perfect is incomprehensible...
So how do you explain just what a Bad Thing that would be?
I have a big library (~3 bookcases' worth of novels, short stories, &c) on my Psion 5mx, and even on its 640x240, 5.5"x2" screen, I find reading novels perfectly comfortable. It's true you need to 'turn the page' more often than a dead-tree book, but when that just involves pressing the space bar or tapping the screen, it's really not an issue. You can choose font and size, of course, and with the backlight you can read in bed with the lights off!
Of course, a very small screen, such as on my current mobile (Siemens S45, about 1" square) would make reading an extremely tedious experience, but when you reach the 5mx's sort of size, once you get engrossed in a story you really don't notice the screen. Or at least, I don't!
It's a matter of personal taste, I'm sure. But don't knock it until you've tried it!
But IMO the issue isn't really electronic vs visual ID. The issue is electronic vs human reading of that ID.
Up till relatively recently, a numberplate could be read by any human, but not by an automated machine. So it could be easily checked when really necessary (e.g. when stopped by the police, when photographed leaving a petrol station without paying, when photographed by a speeding camera, &c). But it wasn't checked as a matter of routine.
Now, though, there are machines which can look at a numberplate and automatically recognise the vehicle ID. And there are RFID chips which can be automatically read by machine. Both of these have a similar effect: car IDs can be read as a matter of course, and checked against whatever information they want to.
Arguably, when used to stop cars which have no tax or insurance, that could be beneficial. But would you want your husband/wife to be able to subpoena records of all your movements in a divorce case, say? ("You claimed to have been working late at the office, but your car was recorded as having driven to your girlfriend's house at 5.27pm that evening!") And if the system is widely used, how easy might it be for people to gain unauthorised access? You have only to look at any detective novel to see how people can have good, legitimate reasons for wanting to conceal their movements. And it'd be a gift for stalkers and paparazzi...
Here in the UK, we already have automated numberplate recognition, not just for speed cameras and red-light cameras, but also for the recognising cars entering the London congestion zone, and sending out appropriate bills. (And I gather there's a good number of people who were billed incorrectly...) There's also a new type of speed camera, which recognises your numberplate as you pass fixed locations on motorways, and issues a speeding ticket if your average speed between two such points exceeds the limit. (Which is fair, but worrying for the privacy implications.)
So yes, I agree with your conclusion that RFID doesn't seem to have any intrinsic dangers over and above those which are here already...
One subtle and clever hoax amongst four or five genuine articles may fool many people, and bring real pleasure to the rest. But five obvious and poorly-done hoaxes out of five isn't even going to fool my cat. (And it's not even a particularly clever cat...)
If you can tell it's a hoax from the title, it's not written very well. The best hoaxes start off completely plausibly, and become more bizarre slowly, so only by the end do you realise you've been fooled.
(But, hey, who reads the whole article, let alone the link, so we'd better fit the whole hoax into 10 words of title, huh?)
Not a perfect method, by any means, but it does look as if it'll bias the sort to show the pages that people actually want to see. Combined with their other ranking methods, maybe it would help to improve their ordering? Or has this been tried?
Erm, it's the 'rest of the world' that wants to use their own characters!
If you look at a map of the world, we native English-speakers aren't in any sort of majority... How would you like, for example, being restricted to the first 20 letters, and having to misspell your domain names to work around the rest?
The most interesting work I have of hers is 1969's White Noise - An Electric Storm. She formed White Noise with David Vorhaus, and along with Brian Hodgson (also from the Radiophonic Workshop) created a bizarre, psychedelic, mostly electronic pop record, full of strange noises, quirky tunes, humour, and genuinely frightening sounds. Not easy to listen to, but well worth the effort.
Her web site is here.
But yes, it's amazing. It's a shame that Ron Grainer gets the only credit for it, because although he wrote the basic tune, Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop did the arrangement and recording, and so much of what we remember it for was down to her. A real unsung pioneer.
And the new version strikes a good balance between keeping all that made the original great (including several actual samples from it) and making it modern too. (Far better than that ghastly orchestral version from the TV movie...)
Back on topic, it's interesting to look at the circumstances of the different actors leaving the series. After 3 years, William Hartnell was suffering ill health, and so the first regeneration was forced on the programme. Patrick Troughton chose to leave after 3 years -- for fear of typecasting. Jon Pertwee left after 4.5 years (possible reasons include the BBC's unwillingness to raise his salary, and also much of the production team moving on). Tom Baker had the longest run at 7 years. (Maybe the typecasting argument was valid in his case -- it was a while before he was in demand again.) Peter Davison had been advised to leave after 3 years by Patrick Troughton; when the time came, he found himself regretting the decision, but it was too late to change his mind. Colin Baker was forced out by the Controller of BBC1 after only 2 years. And Sylvester McCoy had only 2 years in the role before the series was cancelled.
So, so far no-one's left voluntarily after less than 3 years. And out of the 4 actors did leave voluntarily, only the longest-serving one seemed to suffer from typecasting -- and although another two mentioned it as a reason for leaving, one later regretted it. And that was after being in the role for 3 times as long as Eccleston has so far...
Given the range of parts and exposure he's had so far, I very very much doubt Eccleston is in any immediate danger of suffering that way. But given the number of times he's used the past tense in interviews about the series, I suspect that it's more than just a negotiating tactic on his part... :-(
If they can show that PearPC's code is being distributed, then CherryOS need to show that they have the right to do so. The GPL doesn't give them that right, because they're clearly not abiding by it. So the question is, what else gives them that right? The answer is: nothing. They don't have that right. So they're illegally copying and distributing copyright material: clear breach of copyright. (At least, that's how it appears to me, though IANAL of course.)
That's the point of the GPL -- it's constructed on top of copyright law, which is a rather solid foundation.
So a court case wouldn't directly confirm the validity of the GPL. (The defendant would still be up a certain creek even if the GPL happened to be invalid.) Still, it could certainly improve public perception of it, which would be no bad thing.
Yes... apparently, they've grown a second pair of legs.
(For the literature- and irony-impaired, that's a reference to the slogan 'Four legs good, two legs bad' in Orwell's Animal Farm. As used to control the sheep, which were incapable of thinking for themselves and needed something simplistic and catchy for their opinions. I'll leave you to draw the present-day parallels yourselves.)