Yup; and that's certainly 'leet perl; it looks like line noise. ;-)

But we might dispute the comment that it'd take 300 lines of C. 300 lines of readable, well-formatted C, perhaps, but C can be made nearly as cryptic and compact as perl. It's mainly things like pattern matching and table manipulation and such where C requires the use of libraries to be so succinct. For basic bit/number crunching, perl isn't really much more compact than C.

I wonder if the Obscure C folks have tackled this problem. Maybe I should google it ...

Also, all programming languages would put such commas outside the quotes, unless you want each quoted string to contain the comma as its final character, but then you'd need another comma after the quotes to have the correct syntax for a list of quoted strings that each end in commas.

Of course, programming languages are required to follow sensible and logical rules, unlike English, where the rules are just made up on the fly by anyone with access to a pen or keyboard (or touch screen, for the last couple of decades).

Even back in the 70s, the idea that commas belonged inside quotations always seemed a bit bizarre to me. Except, of course, when the speaker actually did an end-of-clause pause at that point, in which case the comma would be the printed representation of what was actually said.

But even then, I understood that there's no logic or reason behind most of the English syntax rules that people make up and try to enforce.

Hey, I've still got my t-shirt with the 3-line perl implementation of pgp, and the explanation on the back that it's legally a "munition". I still wear it once or twice a year to some inappropriate event where I know there'll be lots of them furriner types. ;-)

(So far I've never been arrested for wearing it to public events, and none of my acquaintances who also have one have been arrested either. I've been disappointed to not be able to follow the fun that would follow if they actually tried to punish someone for wearing such dangerous t-shirts.)

Many people would say that most CEOs of big companies are incompetent. This is true, of course, partly because being competent isn't part of the job description. ;-)

One of my fun corporate competence stories is about how I got a (US) 617 area code for my cell phone, which is the area including Boston and a few of its suburbs. I got it while living in Waltham, 10 miles west and in the 781 area. When I got my first cell phone, and used my then land-line phone to get help setting it up, the CS fellow I talked to couldn't find Waltham on a map. After a bit of futzing, which got us nowhere, he asked if it was near Cambridge. I said that it was; you just drive west through Watertown or Belmont, and you'll reach Waltham. So he asked if a Cambridge area code would work, and I told him it'd be fine. (Actually, it's sorta the "status" area code in the metro area, FWIW.)

Now, you'd think that a phone company's database would know about a city of 60,000 people. I guess not, and this tells you a lot about the competence of that company's DB and CS folks. I won't name the company, to avoid publicly shaming them any more than others already have. You'd recognize their name, though.

In my experience, this is about typical for lots of big corporations.

Indeed, and it's nice of the /. editors to send us all this reminder of the fact that you shouldn't ever build anything that depends on a "service" provided by just one company. They can and sometimes do terminate such services, often without notice, or modify them so what you're using them for no longer works. And they tend to get access to all the info about your stuff, to use as they like.

In particular, any organization that depends on a company's service is run by fools. You might be able to use services like "the Cloud" as a sort of backup, if you don't mind the company seeing the contents of all your files. But you must plan for the day when the company you're using cuts you off. The only real way to do this is to make sure that you have (and control your copies of) all the hardware and software needed to keep it running. If you don't, you can be put out of business at any time, with little or no warning.

Personally, I hope that /. keeps posting the occasional stories along this line. It's clear that a lot of people don't understand it. Reminding people of such pitfalls is a public service, and it's useful to have such stories publicised when they happen. (And maybe this will get a few more people involved with openstreetmap. They could use a few more features. ;-)

He's not the first to discover the uses of the commercial shipping companies like Fedex, etc. At least since the mid 90s, people have been doing just that. Part of it was in response to all the airport security that was being developed using poorly-paid, and thus unqualified examiners. The other part was the airlines' growing limits on "excess" baggage, plus their tendency to fly your luggage to some place remote from where they were flying you. People reported that handing it over to the package-shipping people to deliver to your destination did an end run around the airlines' lost luggage issue and the government's incompetent security theater. And the cost was often less than what the airlines would charge for the excess luggage. Others read those reports, tried it, found that it worked, and switched to the same process. And on arrival, they had just the one carry-on bag, didn't have to deal with the airlines' slow luggage-delivery schemes, and could just grab a ride to wherever they were headed, where their luggage, equipment, etc. would be waiting for them.

The airlines should just say the hell with it, convert the bottom of the plane to a second deck of seats, and subcontract the luggage delivery with the folks who know how to do it right. Lots of the frequent-traveller crowd does it that way already.

Nope, while correct Greek survives the Preview process into further editing, it does seem to disappear entirely when you post it.

So he spelled it ""? ;-)

Hmmm ... Yet again, /. messes up anything not in the English alphabet. Funny things is that the editing panel shows my reply correctly, with the (classical) Greek spelling of the word between the quotes. But the Preview just shows two adjacent quotes, with the Greek characters omitted.

Sure would be nice if we could discuss "foreign" words, especially in spelling and etymology messages, and have them show up spelled correctly. ;-)

I think I'll post this with the original Greek word there, and see what appears in the edit panel after it's been through the posting process ....

If you're using a wireless gadget, chances are that most of your bandwidth is taken up by those ads. And actually, just blocking them may not help your bandwidth much, because by the time your software figures out that a given download is an ad, all it can do is not display the ad. But its byte count has been added to your account by your ISP/cell provider. So you're paying for it whether or not you actually see it.

At least, that's the way it mostly works here in the US. Yes, if it's from a known ad server, it's possible to block its address and not download it at all. But advertisers are getting pretty good at avoiding this, setting it up so that if your software blocks by address, it'll block the content you want along with the ads that come via the same server.

I've read a few things about this, and noticed that they don't seem to address a common problem: In high-traffic conditions, if you try to leave a "recommended" safe distance from the vehicle in front of you, what happens is that the drivers in adjacent lanes see that large gap, and fill it. Then you slow down to get far enough behind them, and that space gets filled in. Before long, you're driving at half the speed limit, people behind you are honking like crazy, and the ones that passing you are giving you the finger. ;-)

This is, of course, the opposite of tailgating. Some of us do try to keep a (relatively) safe distance, but other drivers make that impossible. So far, I haven't read of any solutions to this problem. Do you have a link to a solution?

(Yeah, I know; just don't drive in high-traffic conditions. That doesn't always work, either. Google traffic does help a lot now, but often there are no alternate routes that are any better. ;-)

Or bored kids with time on their hands. Or anyone who decides they don't like you or thinks you need to be punished for something you said.

Makes sense. After all, to the current Republican leadership, Reagan was a liberal president.

Yup. Maybe what we should do is start seriously promoting the idea of pre-loading, and get people familiar with this capability. We could work toward filling everyone's browser caches with copies of not just ISIS pages, but also pages from all other web sites that our governments disapprove of.

We should emphasize that there's no real need to ever actually show these cached copies of pages to the users, unless they actually ask for them. Just the fact that they've been download (and noted by their ISPs) is sufficient to convict them after all. We could catch all sorts of people, innocent and otherwise.

Perhaps if a few cases like this were publicised, and we explained to the confused journalists just how easy it is to frame people this way, we could have an effect.

In any case, any HTML developer should be familiar with the concept. It has a major valid use, after all: It can significantly speed up the speed of a lot of web sites. Any developers not familiar with the tools to do it just aren't doing their jobs right.

Actually, it's a long, complex story. 1000 or so years ago, Scotland was mostly forested. At the other end, the Highland Clearances in the 1700s and 1800s didn't just force most of the people out; the major intent was to clear the land for sheep farming, which had become a good income source for the landowners with the development of modern cloth-production techniques. This led to the conversion of most of the countryside to grazing land, eliminating most of the remaining trees.

But that was merely the last blow. Before that, the forests had been heavily mined for wood for shipbuilding, and for producing charcoal to power the growing factories.

It didn't help that Scotland (and Ireland) was on the edge of the tree-supporting area, with the tree line roughly along the northwestern coasts. This meant that the forests were naturally rather slow-growing, and the tree species weren't the largest. So it was easy to over-harvest them if there was any sort of profit from the wood or a more profitable use of a tree-free land area.

Do a bit of googling; you can find lots of info on the history scattered around the internet. Similar things also happened in Scandiavia, so you might look for histories of forestry there as well. But the people there were mostly along the coastlines, and the center had much taller mountains, so the forests survived a lot better than in the British Isles.

The summary is that the treeless scenery of much of Scotland isn't at all natural; it's directly attributed to human "management" of the land. There's plenty of evidence that it would have been mostly forest without its human population, at least for the past 5000 or more years as the last Ice Age slowly faded out..

The "smoking gun" in the whole thing was the copy of the original publication that Warner presented to the court. It has a smudged-out piece of text that they claimed no knowledge of. Someone found a copy of the book in a library, and the text wasn't smudged out. It was the original copyright information.

Ya can look it up ... (Try googling "Happy Birthday smudge" .;-)