Live from Austin!

In Chicago, the police are asking loyal citizens to report anyone seen using a map or binoculars, or taking photographs.

Meanwhile in California, police are stopping drivers who have done nothing wrong in order to compliment their driving and give them $5 gift vouchers.

Both of these seem to me to be misguided. The former is obviously nutty; do they really want the 911 dispatchers bothered by some paranoid who just saw someone take a picture of Chicago’s art deco architecture?

The latter I can understand the motivation behind, but I can’t help wondering how many recipients will feel that the gift voucher is worth  the stress and/or anger of being pulled over. And for a US cop, any time you stop a vehicle, you’re risking your life; I can imagine them stopping a good driver who happens to have a car full of drugs, and having him freak out and start shooting.

Nice to see that the developers of Perl are still solving the important problems:

say() is a new built-in, only available when use feature 'say' is in effect, that is similar to print(), but that implicitly appends a newline to the printed string.

A new prototype character has been added. _ is equivalent to $ but defaults to $_ if the corresponding argument isn’t supplied.

–perldelta for 5.10

This is exactly the kind of stuff that made me give up on Perl. And mro is a pretty horrible new feature too.