Also:
The word will be a safer place if everyone checked that their customers were innocent!
I agree completely. There is no reason that a program cannot read UTF-8 and store as UTF-32 internally. There is a trade-off between time and memory. Note that UTF-16 is also a variable length encoding scheme so you still need to start at the start of string to find the nth character.
Unicode and how it is represented in a file are two different things. Unicode is a good idea, it solves many problems and contains all the (to me) strange characters used by: Greeks, Chinese, etc.
How to represent it in a file is different. UTF-8 is the obvious answer today, but other encodings were tried by different organisations first. The big win of UTF-8 is that you can have characters from very different regions on the same web page (or in the same file) - something that you cannot do you you adopt a purely 8 bit code like iso-8859-1.
We are still in transition: there are files encoded in various ways out there; however I think that UTF-8 will eventually become the encoding mechanism that everyone uses - so files encoded in other ways will become increasingly rare. So: a bit of patience please.
Those are the current limits. So do you build your business round the database that is free today and hope that: a) your business does not grow so that it needs more, and b) that MS does not reduce the limits and catch you. Either way you run the risk of ending up having to pay the license fees. Why not pick a database that will always be free - and keep that cash for something else ?
So if someone makes a complaint about corporate GPL violation - will the violating company's web site be blocked as well ? If so it could be useful. However I suspect that this law is aimed at protecting corporate profits and not controlling corporate robbers.
It is not how they are doing it, but why -- what have they got to hide? If they are not doing anything wrong then they have nothing to fear by us knowing!
I am not a sheep.
Will it include corporates such as newspapers who grab images, etc, from individuals' web sites and publish it on their web site and ignore any attempt by the copyright holder (individual) to get proper compensation ?
I doubt it - such laws do not seem to apply to corporates.
I much prefer chatting face to face, but in a distributed environment that is often not possible - so what I will actually achieve is phone or email. Having said that: a written form (eg email) can be better at communicating decisions that are complex and need to be remembered.
Is it named as a tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy ?
I would like to know: the next time that I receive a £60 parking ticket will the authorities be content with me paying £5?
I now have it; but I am now looking for a monitor that is wide enough
Defining "pop music" as whatever is on the Billboard Top 100, especially now, is reductive. I understand it's quantifiable and that's the best idea they had for a quantitative definition of pop. However, Billboard's charts are virtually irrelevant when trying to ascertain what people **actually listen to by choice**
Correct: it is talking about the sales of new records/CDs. This tends to disfavour long lasting styles such as classical music and boosts the here-today, gone-tomorrow junk that fills the 'pop parade'. This is exactly what the music industry wants, they need churn in taste and bands/performers/... to keep people buying their output.
Zimmermann might well be good and honest
In mitigation: they do publish their source code for review. I don't know how easy it is to check that that is what is installed on the phone that you buy.
I have to ask: is there secret NSA involvement in this ? An inside man who will put a couple of back-doors in the 'phone.
I have absolutely no knowledge that this is the case, but the NSA certainly has the resources & motivation to do so. It seems to have done this sort of thing in the past.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.
