Because there's no such thing as an assignment operator in bash. Everything is a string token at first (even numbers aren't number unless you're in arithmetic evaluation context), and then tokens get interpreted in various ways once split by whitespace.

x = 3 happens to be three tokens, the first one being the command 'x', the other two being parameters '=' and '3' to command 'x'.

x=3 is one token and it doesn't mean assignment unless it's in the command preface where assignments take place.

This is from 'man bash', under SHELL GRAMMAR / Simple Commands:

The AC failed to recognise the $(command) construct, which is 'execute this command and give me its output as a string.

And the AC also messed up the arithmetic. This is what should have been written:

This three are even better:

Variable expansion happens in the arithmetic context (see 'man bash' / EXPANSION / Arithmetic Expansion), so doing $(($x + 1)) is actually wrong, because if $x expands to 'y' then you end up with $((y + 1)), which might be useful sometimes, but given the lack of understanding shown it's probably not what you're actually trying to do.

RTFM means 'man bash' in this case. It may take you a day to go through it and experiment with what you learn in each section, but it's worth it.

At this rate, we'll see MS commit stuff to Wine not long before Christmas.

I'll start a collection for all the tormented souls in Hell, as they'll need lots and lots of warm clothing as the ice age dawns upon them.

Give $1000 to charity (won't make any difference to Elon Musk) and give the other $4000 to whoever designs the rest of the city around Tesla's Gigafactory and Powerwall products. Unless Tesla are secretly developing oxygen systems for their already ongoing space concern.

So now people will have passwords like this:

google_password
tinder_password
linkedin_password
facebook_password

instead of just "password"

I think at this point using a Google Authenticator generated code _as_ the password should be enough. It removes the user from the process of creating a "correct horse battery staple" password. It makes the authentication pretty much on par with SSH key authentication (you have a private key, Google has the public part, you generate a code that demonstrated that you have the correct key). I'd like to see phishing sites ask you for your private key, as see how many morons are out there who would actually jump through the hoops of obtaining that key from their phones and pasting it to the phisher, 'cause hey, "a million Nigerian dollars is a lot of money".

This one? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1367912015000917

That's what Google gave me. The abstract looks very interesting.

From TFS: "Faggin was upset about Intel's new requirement that employees had to arrive by eight in the morning, while he usually worked nights."

I've heard both sides of the story:

Side A: But if you're in the office while everybody else is in, you can work more efficiently, as everybody else is there to answer your questions.
Side B: Some of the best engineers I've worked with worked nights. Some of them slept under their desks and rarely showered, but none of the 9-5 people came close to their performance.

Basically, if people perform don't mess with their schedule or their appearance.

If you're on Side B, Side A also has that negative that is given as a positive: everybody else is there. (sarcastic tone of voice) Yeah!! If you want to not get any work done because of all the "quick" questions everybody has while "headphones" doesn't register with them as "leave me alone!"

Yeah me too... I want to ask him/her how many failed attempts it took to evolve this great decision... It does look like an infinity or similar number of attempts before one of them stuck... And then those other things that don't stick are still attempted even though the right one has already been chosen...

What one ISP I used once did, to prevent people with routers and networks from getting out, was to filter by TTL. Windows has a default TTL of 64. Any TTL below that was "beyond" a router. Of course, then everybody with an ounce of Google either had an iptables rule in their router to increase the TTL by one in mangle/POSTROUTING or, if the router was an off the shelf one, just tell each machine on the LAN to have a TTL of 65. The people not versed in Google-fu didn't have routers either, so everybody was blissfully happy.

I've encountered a camera that actively uses UPnP (Gateway profile) to ask the router to forward port 80 to itself and also connects to a Chinese dynamic DNS service as a bonus by default. While you can disable the dynamic DNS setting, you have no say in the UPnP thing.

These cameras are so badly thought out that they crash when a different UPnP device on your network responds.

But hey, they're cheap. You find them on Alibaba (the guys with the big IPO).

This one? It sounds awesome just by reading the project description.

I can say I have. I couldn't wrap my head around RPM, but I didn't try that hard. Debs on the other hand are easy as pie. It takes me about 5 minutes to refresh my memory on dh_make (man dh_make), then create a deb using dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b -us -uc (if you actually want signatures it still doesn't get much harder). No pain in the ass at all, royal or otherwise.

Unless there's a reduced rate for the loaf of bread, the tax man won't really care. But you're the one in trouble if you need to give the car back for whatever reason, because hey, you didn't pay anything for it. And we don't do returns on the loaf of bread - or, let's say, something more durable: a special shell from the seaside. If anything, the tax man might take an interest in you for capital gains (about 20K?) if you ever sell the car on. I don't think it would qualify as chattels.

Also, the situation isn't anywhere near your analogy. In this case it's a 20K car with a free loaf of bread (that you can give back, but you only get 0.00, since the bread only comes with the car and has no market value by itself).

You're making good points up to here:

The first page ends like this: "Your patch is welcome..." from the tyrant. They could always go the Apple way and never respond, ever... And if your bug gets fixed, good for you. If not... /dev/null is your conversation partner.

I've been skimming over page 2, and it's a pissing contest. Apparently the change was done in "next version", but the version in question (0.9) was left unchanged because of this one user. The markings were there: just fork it and backport it, or wait for the next version.

But that's not the point I want to make. The point is that's what you get when you deal with the developers directly instead of a PR department (because there isn't any). I've experienced this outside software too: you never, ever, talk to the operators of your ISP. You talk to PR, and they forward your complaints to the admins, and their responses/actions back to you. I was a customer for a very tiny ISP (one admin, two servers, one sales guy, no PR). They would offer support over chat, and the admin would get on the line himself. Discussions would easily escalate to be indistinguishable from what I've just read in that VLC thread. Customers think they'll get a better deal if they raise their tone, and don't give a fuck about reason. I managed to get myself a "free Internet" deal by volunteering to do the PR for them, since I was on chat all the time anyway, and I had the knowledge, and didn't mind the experience. Customer attitudes differed, because they were aware I had no real power, and my role was to massage their "fuck you" filled complaints into something the admin and company owners could read without getting grief.

You can get tyranny with closed source and large companies just fine, but for some reason that's OK?

You can be a member of the beer drinking club without drinking any of the beer. The cost is exactly the same to you, irrespective of how much the club is paying for the development of the beer. The beer is available for free, should you want it, and you have the right membership card to show at the bar.

OEMs might be able to circumvent the Italian ruling, now that I think about it, if they offer software-less hardware for exactly the same price as if you had the most basic version of Windows pre-installed (the one that won't let you change the wallpaper - Windows Starter Edition? because it's not illegal to take the piss, it's only bad for business when customers realise the quality of the offering), but anything above the basic offering can still be declined and refunded if not specifically ordered.

Where the money to fund the giveaway comes from is irrelevant. Only how much you sell it for, given that you can shake hands on the sale.

Where does the money come from for the development of Linux and its userland? Linus, Red Hat, their friends, surely spend money/time to develop the things. Yet there's no refund for the software if I sell you a laptop with an unwanted Linux distro pre-installed, even if I charge you 1000% markup. It's your own fault you're paying me the stupid markup, not mine. The difference that Apple write OS X themselves doesn't change this.

In Apple's case, the shaking of hands on the software depends on the licensing terms, which say "we're giving you OS X for nothing, but the catch is you may only install it on our hardware" or some such. And if Apple is forced to prove this, they can always add this to their lineup: "Mac without OS, optional OS disc available for $0" for the same price as the Macs with pre-installed OS X. If that doesn't drive the point home, I don't know what does.

So, if MS want to circumvent the Italian ruling, they have to start selling overpriced hardware with free Windows (I suggest the name "Surface" :D). And kick every OEM out there in the nuts in the process. You can see MS can't do this overnight without kicking themselves in the nuts as well.