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Get over it. PHP is not perfect, but it does a damn good job. If it didn't, it wouldn't be so widely used.

Yes, all things that are popular are good and work well! Windows 3.1 and Visual Basic were very popular. So was the belief that the earth is flat. And there's chlamydia. That's hella popular.

I've been using PHP for eight years and there hasn't been a day where I wished I had chosen another language.

No offense, but if you've been using the same language for eight years without any regrets, I don't see you as having enough perspective to offer up much useful information.

As far as I can tell, PHP is popular because it's perfectly adequate language for cranking out some basic dynamic pages, and it's very easy to learn and set up. However, just like Visual Basic, the things that make it useful in the shallow end of the pool keep it from being useful at scale. And from the eternal trickle of security issues and the host of weird issues with it, it was apparently designed by amateurs.

If you're happy with it, that's awesome. Carry on. Just don't get your knickers in a twist because a lot of people correctly see it as the wrong tool for their jobs.

http://toykeeper.net/media/Max_Headroom/
http://video.aol.com/video-category/max-headroom/1 583

I must agree about PHP being un-magical. It's great for one or two specific purposes, but is pretty lacking for anything else. Want a simple web email form? It'd be hard to find an easier way to do it than PHP. But if you want a large web application, it's worth trying other languages. What's magical and amazing is that people have built incredible things with it despite its shortcomings -- projects like Drupal and Mediawiki are sheer wizardry.

I've been keeping a list of problems with PHP, if anyone wants details. I won't say it's not biased, but it's not terribly religious either. It just attempts to list some of the more important issues.

I received a Canon LiDE 30 a while ago as a gift, and it has been rather nice. It's relatively portable, USB-powered, works well with SANE, and produces much nicer images than my old scsi umax scanner. It's also relatively cheap, last I checked. I recommend using it with a USB2 host, but USB1.1 will work if you don't try to send data faster than USB1 can handle.

For more details, I wrote up a review along with some ideas for descreening scans of magazine-style prints.

• HH:SSS, UCT. the one you linked to... 100 time units per day, with three decimal points.
• BBB, Swiss timezone. Swatch Internet Time: 1000 "beats" per day.
• HMM:SS, local timezone. This is the one I use, because it works best for the things we generally use time for. Feel free to try it, if you have python and gtk. (requires pycfg and tktk too)

• HH:SSS, UCT. the one you linked to... 100 time units per day, with three decimal points.
• BBB, Swiss timezone. Swatch Internet Time: 1000 "beats" per day.
• HMM:SS, local timezone. This is the one I use, because it works best for the things we generally use time for. Feel free to try it, if you have python and gtk. (requires pycfg and tktk too)

70% of the people, my fellow slashdotters, are ... poorly educated, non-rational... folks, they're stupid, and they hold out fates in their hands. I know, that's anti-democratic. But when a race is based on the will of the people, by pure numbers, candidates have to worry about how people perceive them on an emotional level, not on how they stand on issues.

Though I'd generally agree that people are stupid... I think you just explained Bush's campaign technique. He won because he ignored issues, appealed to people on an emotional level, and told the stupid masses what would make them feel better.

The electoral college does not protect us from that sort of politics.

I don't know a reasonable, fair way to keep clueless knee-jerk voters out of the system. If this image has any truth to it, a simple IQ test (require an IQ of 100 or greater) would have produced a landslide victory for Kerry. But that's not fair, and not democratic. So, we'll just have to deal with all those uninformed people who haven't been paying attention to the world; the ones who made the PIPA report so interesting. Bleh.

For now, the only reasonable things I think would help are: switch to Condorcet voting, get rid of the electoral college, and add a "nobody" entry in every election.

The current voting system in the US is arguably one of the worst ever used. Sure, I'm glad I have the right to vote, but I'd be much happier about it if the voting system did not make my vote irrelevant.

There are two main problems with the US voting system: an incomplete way of expressing one's preference, and the electoral college. Together, these create a system which is extremely chaotic and sensitive to small manipulations. Look at the way results change over time, and the numbers jump wildly around. Sites such as http://www.electoral-vote.com have detailed election data demonstrating this.

Limitations of Singular Voting
Many people, when deciding how to vote in the US, encounter the same problems and dilemmas over and over. For example, what if you really like a 3rd-party candidate? Do you "throw your vote away" by voting how you truly feel? Or, do you "choose the lesser of two evils" by picking one of the Democrat or Republican candidates? Frankly, in the current system, voting for a 3rd-party candidate in a major election means you choose to let your vote be ignored. The only way you can make your vote count in this environment is to lie on your ballot. But why should it be necessary to falsify your preferences?

Much effort has gone into voting theory research, in an attempt to find an ideal way to choose an action based on personal preferences. This field involves two main concepts: collecting the most detailed and accurate preferences possible, and evaluating the data in the most fair manner. In both of these aspects, Condorcet voting has emerged as a fairly clear winner. It has the most desirable properties of any voting system devised so far, and the fewest undesirable properties.

I propose changing the US electoral system to use Condorcet voting, instead of its current system.

Electoral College
Once upon a time, the Electoral College was a good idea. Back when it took a very long time to send a messenger across the country, it wasn't feasible to count every person's vote. So we used the next best thing -- a smaller model of the country, designed to be as fair as possible without becoming unmanageable.

But the restrictions of back then no longer apply. The electoral college now is, at best, an inconvenience which reduces the accuracy of elections. At worst, it is an effective and abused tool for Gerrymandering. It produces large changes in the election results based on very small populations of people, making elections very chaotic. It usually has the effect of throwing away nearly half the votes of each state, and sometimes (as with Dubya) even produces a different result than the popular vote. People in states which are either Democrat or Republican strongholds cannot make a difference by voting against the majority.

Several people have created programs to deal with the symptoms of the broken electoral college, such as vote-trading organizations. In that way, you can relocate your vote to a place where it might matter, instead of wasting it where you can be assured it will not count.

I propose eliminating the Electoral College, and using the popular vote instead.

Vote for Nobody
As an added enhancement, adding "Nobody" to each ballot would make it possible to more accurately express preferences. If you disapprove of all the candidates (or, in Condorcet, disapprove of any), voting for "Nobody" means you don't have to choose the lesser of various evils. And, if the "Nobody" candidate wins, the election would need to be held again, with entirely different candidates.

(this is a copy of the on-topic rant at my site)

The current voting system in the US is arguably one of the worst ever used. Sure, I'm glad I have the right to vote, but I'd be much happier about it if the voting system did not make my vote irrelevant.

There are two main problems with the US voting system: an incomplete way of expressing one's preference, and the electoral college. Together, these create a system which is extremely chaotic and sensitive to small manipulations. Look at the way results change over time, and the numbers jump wildly around. Sites such as http://www.electoral-vote.com have detailed election data demonstrating this.

Limitations of Singular Voting
Many people, when deciding how to vote in the US, encounter the same problems and dilemmas over and over. For example, what if you really like a 3rd-party candidate? Do you "throw your vote away" by voting how you truly feel? Or, do you "choose the lesser of two evils" by picking one of the Democrat or Republican candidates? Frankly, in the current system, voting for a 3rd-party candidate in a major election means you choose to let your vote be ignored. The only way you can make your vote count in this environment is to lie on your ballot. But why should it be necessary to falsify your preferences?

Much effort has gone into voting theory research, in an attempt to find an ideal way to choose an action based on personal preferences. This field involves two main concepts: collecting the most detailed and accurate preferences possible, and evaluating the data in the most fair manner. In both of these aspects, Condorcet voting has emerged as a fairly clear winner. It has the most desirable properties of any voting system devised so far, and the fewest undesirable properties.

I propose changing the US electoral system to use Condorcet voting, instead of its current system.

Electoral College
Once upon a time, the Electoral College was a good idea. Back when it took a very long time to send a messenger across the country, it wasn't feasible to count every person's vote. So we used the next best thing -- a smaller model of the country, designed to be as fair as possible without becoming unmanageable.

But the restrictions of back then no longer apply. The electoral college now is, at best, an inconvenience which reduces the accuracy of elections. At worst, it is an effective and abused tool for Gerrymandering. It produces large changes in the election results based on very small populations of people, making elections very chaotic. It usually has the effect of throwing away nearly half the votes of each state, and sometimes (as with Dubya) even produces a different result than the popular vote. People in states which are either Democrat or Republican strongholds cannot make a difference by voting against the majority.

Several people have created programs to deal with the symptoms of the broken electoral college, such as vote-trading organizations. In that way, you can relocate your vote to a place where it might matter, instead of wasting it where you can be assured it will not count.

I propose eliminating the Electoral College, and using the popular vote instead.

Vote for Nobody
As an added enhancement, adding "Nobody" to each ballot would make it possible to more accurately express preferences. If you disapprove of all the candidates (or, in Condorcet, disapprove of any), voting for "Nobody" means you don't have to choose the lesser of various evils. And, if the "Nobody" candidate wins, the election would need to be held again, with entirely different candidates.

(this is a copy of the on-topic rant at my site)

I've been enjoying my Zaurus as a music player too. My setup is unusual (running mostly the familiar-unstable distro, with OpenZaurus's kernel, and a semi-wonky X11 setup), but it does what I want.

When I host parties, I hook up the Zaurus to some speakers, a power outlet, and my CF wifi card. It plays music off my server elsewhere in the house, and I can control it easily from my notebook without having to go anywhere near the "stereo".

Or, for just myself, I often stick it in my pocket with a 256MB CF card in it, and listen on headphones for up to 4 hours. If I turn the backlight off, it plays about that long before the battery gets dangerously low.

Perhaps the best part though, is being able to customize everything as much as I like. Half the software I use on it is stuff I wrote myself. And with a SD/MMC card, there's plenty of room for me to tinker.