Here are some things that are not just okay, but great, transgressive, brilliant, amazing, and should be entirely legal:

And, here is something that is awful, horrible, embarassing, exploitative, and should be illegal:

Anyone want to step up and explain the difference to me?

Just for the record:

People making guesses about Apple’s Intel strategy have focused on two possibilities for OS X on Intel:

One, that third-party application vendors would have to re-compile their code for the new architecture. Two, that Apple has developed or will develop a reasonably fast PPC emulation layer.

I think there’s a third possibility: that Apple has developed a layer which will, upon the first attempt to execute an incompatible application bundle, dis-assemble, roughly translate, re-assemble, and save the binary for the new architecture. Admittedly, I’m not really qualified to assess how impossible a task this is. Since we’re looking at a pretty constrained set of binaries, compiled for known APIs, and with known toolchains, it seems like writing a really smart disassembler wouldn’t be quite as difficult as writing a really fast emulator.

A fourth possibility: some kind of internet-based distribution mechanism for binaries. Vendors supply Apple with new binaries, or Apple builds new binaries itself, somehow. Since the binary itself makes up such a small chunk of the application bundle, why not a mechanism which checks for a simple hash in an online database, downloads, and updates the relevant bundle?

Just throwing it out there.

Last month, I found a letter on the streets of Evanston, Illinois. I’m sorry, dear reader, that it took me so long to scan it in and make it available to you. It’s dated September 22, 1988, and it’s addressed to a ‘Gingy’. I have no idea if it’s authentic, but I’m pretty sure it was printed on form-feed paper by a dot-matrix printer.

If this letter is yours, and you’d prefer that it be kept private, please let me know.

From the BBC (via BoingBoing):

Mystery shoe saga stumps couple

Pairs of shoes are being left in mysterious circumstances outside a remote farmhouse in Lincolnshire.

Jason and Claire Foster, who live near Market Rasen, do not know who is doing it or why they have left as many as four pairs of shoes at one time.

The family have video footage, which shows an elderly couple driving by in a green vehicle depositing the shoes.

Mrs Foster said that although it was scary at first, she was rather hoping some of the pairs might fit.

Okay, this was weird, and about the entire content of the Boing Boing link/article. But the last half of the article is what really caught my eye:

East Lindsey District Council are investigating the incident as a case of fly tipping.

“Sometimes it’s odd ones, sometimes it’s a couple of pairs. But they’re of all shapes and sizes. There has even been pairs of roller blades,” a council environment official said.

“There must have been more than 30 pairs so far – it’s been going on for months.”

He said the maximum penalty for a first offence of fly-tipping was £20,000, but it depended on its severity.

Fly tipping — now there’s a usage you don’t see much in around these parts. It turns out that fly-tipping is what we would call “illegal dumping”. It’s a great little phrase: “fly” in this case is related to “flee”, and “tipping” is what dump trucks and wheelbarrows do. Maybe we’d call it “dump-and-dash”, or “chuck-and-run”. Not quite as English, though, is it?