We don't need capital punishment, or other such things.
We just need to enforce the laws exactly as they stand. It's something like a minimum of six months in prison for each access, so in practice spammers would end up in prison for thousands of years.
Of course, parole and good behavior would mean they could get out in 200-300 years...we're not heartless.
That the risk/reward structure is so far out of wack is very puzzling. You think some state DA would have a lot of fun arresting one of these guys and charging (and convicting them) of the thousands of unauthorized access made in that state.
Can you imagine the ads they would run for reelection based on their conviction ratio? 'On average, DA in this state have a 80% conviction rate of about 300 felonies. I managed to convict people of 99.92% of the 3000 felony charges I bought. And I did it with the same budget. Reelect me in 2010...'
According to the original documentation, 'In early 2008, a security company identified one
botnet -- which it dubbed "Mega-D" -- that sent sparn promoting Affking's VPXL and King
Replica products as the worst botnet in the world, accounting for 32% of all spam.'
The Mega-D botnet consisted at least 264,784 computers.
Why the FUCK are we 'fining' someone who committed at least 264,784 felonies? We invade goddamn countries and charge people with war crimes for that level of criminality!
Anti-spam laws are nonsense. Forget the damn anti-spam laws. Lock them up for the felonies they're committing. Extradition would be a lot easier, too. (Of course, we could just find a few hundred IPs this guy hijacked in Australia, turn them over, and have him locked up there his entire life, instead.)
...the problem is that software patents don't work like actual patents.
I made a rant about this some time ago and put it on my mostly defunct blog. I will summarize:
Actual patents have industries making an choice to use them. 'Should we license this tech for 4 cents an item from a competitor, and save 10, or should we attempt to research our own way, or maybe we should research on top of their patent so we can cross license our addition back for the original patent'.
It is an actual, calculated decision.
Software patents, OTOH, fall into two categories. The first is 'patents that should not be issued'. These aren't even actual 'software' patents, they're 'patents on how computers get used', idiotic things like RSS feeds and one-click shopping, stuff that isn't original in any way, shape, or idea, and should never have exists.
But let's forget about those, and talk about reasonable patents, like on MP3 encoding and stuff like that. That specific one is 'Here is a process to strip out audio information from a file and still have it sound mostly the same to people'. It's certainly patentable, it required a lot of scientific research, and it doesn't attempt to cover all ways to strip audio information and reduce the size of a file, just a single specific one.
The problem there is programmers don't choose to use a patented process and pay royalties. Ever. If they hit a (reasonable) patent, they just spend a little more time and effort, and perhaps a bit more CPU and filesize, and work around it.
It's only when they don't know they're using a patent that they just one. And then, a decade later, when it becomes popular, suddenly everyone realizes it's patented.
People would have invented their own method of doing that, but now it's too late, everyone is using that format, and we're all screwed.
Software patents are all either a) too broad, and shouldn't be issued, or b) submarine ones. The actual legitimate situation of real patents, where engineers choose to use the patent, or use something else, is entirely nonexistent.
It doesn't have anything to do with 'hidden APIs'.
There are plenty of apps that are rejected for dumb things, and even more apps that are rejected for simply giving people too much control over their phone.
There are plenty of apps that don't use standard APIs, but that's not the reason people jailbreak their phone. They jailbreak their phone because they want to run ScummVM or be able to background process or use VoIP over 3g, all of which are using entirely standard APIs yet breaking the 'rules' of the iPhone.
'iPhone' can also be a verb without too much work. (phone already is.)
Perhaps a comma was missing and it should have read:
[implied I] iPhone App Store Rejects, Find a New Home.
I.e., perhaps someone was looking for a new place for their app, and looked in the phone book and found a place called "App Store Rejects".
So they meant: 'I called (on my iPhone, and I am a Apple brand whore), a place called "App Store Rejects", and I found a new home for my app by doing that'.
(Or perhaps it was 'ape store reject', and that was a typo, and the story is about calling about animals being turned out from pet stores.)
Or perhaps it was actually:
iPhone, Apps Store Rejects, Find[s] a New Home
With two missing commas and some subject/verb disagreement, it would fit right in as a slashdot headline. And of course they rejected an iPhone, it's a download store, you can't sell used iPhones on it.
Every time I read headlines, I think about the Discworld book 'The Truth' and the hilarious comments about headlines in it.
You have come up with some imaginary reason I don't shop at Amazon, and then have come up with reasons this imaginary reason you invented is wrong. This is incredibly annoying. Giving a reason that I shop somewhere does not mean I REFUSE to shop elsewhere.
And, of course, it doesn't help that your reason, than B&N is a 'bigger big box retailer', is just flat out silly. As you just agreed, Amazon is actually much bigger, so if I actually had some sort of moral objection to large stores, by any logic I should be shopping at B&N anyway. (Actually Books-A-Million would be the best choice, I think.)
But, in actual fact, I have no problem with Amazon at all, as I've stated repeated, as I stated in my original post, which was me agreeing that Amazon was a better place to shop than Walmart. Although I don't care about how big a store is, I refuse to patronize Walmart for entirely different reasons.
I just prefer to patronize brick and morter stores, and, when I can't make it to them or need something they don't have in stock, their online version. This is because brick and morter stores are in serious danger of dying off in my area, and I'll gladly pay an extra 10% if it continues to mean such stores will continue to exist.
Plus, I do have a moral objection to the way online stores manage to have lower prices because they just blithely have customers defraud states out of sales tax. That isn't really Amazon's fault, but there is a false savings there predicated on people not manually paying sales tax like they are supposed to.
In your original post I replied to you say nothing what so ever about there being no locally owned bookstores. It wasn't until I asked why you weren't buying from them until you said there were none. Now what's the possibility you would have said that if I had not asked?
Yeah, and if this was my original reply to you saying 'You should stop at local stores', I would probably make a joke about how there aren't any local new book stores, and proceed to list the total lack of them.
Oh, like I did.
You then proceeded to assert I was 'refusing' to buy from Amazon and that decision was based on some sort of wrongness or something. And then talk about how I was shopping at 'bigger box retailers' while you choose to shop elsewhere, totally ignoring the fact I wasn't 'choosing' to shop at B&N vs. smaller stores.
You are asserting Magento takes 2-3 times longer to modify than OSCommerce.
Okay, that is theoretically possible.
To insert a random car analogy, that's sorta like asserting that a Hummer is a more fuel efficient vehicle than a FooMobile. That is theoretically possible, as I've never see or even heard of a FooMobile, so perhaps FooMobiles come attached to an immovable building, for example. But that does not mean you should go around recommending a Hummer for fuel efficiency.
I can't even begin to comprehend how brain damaged a system takes longer to modify than OSCommerce would be.
I recommend you look at Joomla w/Virtuemart if you think that OSCommerce, of all things, is the easiest to modify. There's a lot of files, but almost all that's Joomla...virtuemart is in administrator/componants/com_virtumart/, and is 500 files _max_, and actually organized in directories.
There's also a Drupal solution that is apparently okay, but I don't know Drupal that well.
What you mean is that PHP doesn't force namespaces. It has them, just no one uses them.
No Asynchronous execution.
That is not particularly relevant for a web programming language where a new process starts, runs code, and exits. You can't safely have background threads in that circumstances. It makes it really hard to write daemons in, but not for web programming.
Non-standard date formats
This just baffles me. Do you mean the DateTime object?
I've always stored dates as a Unix timestamp in PHP.
Dangerous stuff like "Global"
That is a valid point.
Without Zend-acceleration its incredibly slow.
All languages can be incredibly slow if you run them wrong.
If you're not using eAccelerator or Zend or Xcache or another bytecode cacher, you're running PHP wrong.
Now, you want to argue that a bytecode cache should be included within PHP, just like it's in Python and whatever, go right ahead.
Amen. It is amazing how popular total crap is, sometimes. It got there first, and, by God, people will continue to use it five years later no matter what's come out in the meantime.
I will point out this isn't entirely the fault of PHP. It happens in other languages too. Two words: BIND and sendmail.
Or, at least, works a heck of a lot better than OSCommerce, which is completely unmanageable to edit.
Also, the OSCommerce people seem utterly unable to actually make releases. The current release candidate is almost two years old at this point.
As usual, they're devoting their time to the alpha of the next version, and any complaints about bugs will direct you to the cvs server. Heaven forbid people want an actual functioning piece of software.
Oh, and as a fun feature, a hole was discovered in OSCommerce 6 months ago. They haven't even updated the release candidate, or provided a patch. Their instructions for fixing the hole is to.htaccess protect the admin directory. Nice security, you retarded monkeys.
Virtuemart, OTOH, is not very 'good', but only in the sense it's not very featurefull. For example, you can't sell serial numbers, for a feature I've wanted. But I was able to add that in, as the code was actually understandable, unlike OSCommerce's code. It's a basic start of a system that works fine for what it does, and PHP coding can take it wherever you want.
It actually has reasonable templates, and the fact it's inside Joomla means you're just templating the content part, and the rest of it is just the Joomla template.
My biggest complaint is that, because of having to add features, I have found it hard to upgrade, which I guess is as much my fault as anyone elses.
HAHA! You refuse to buy from Amazon but patronize a bigger big box retailer.
I don't 'refuse' to buy from Amazon at all. I refuse to buy from Walmart, I just don't buy from Amazon. (And my moral problem with Walmart has nothing to do with their habit of crowding out competitors, it is how they treat their workers that I dislike.)
I buy from B&N because, although it sometimes costs more, it also supports actual physical bookstores, which in my part of the world, almost do not exist at all. I am afraid that if Amazon keeps growing, local bookstores will cease to exist.
However, only crazy people think B&N is bigger than Amazon.
B&N had sales of $1.2 billion last quarter. Amazon had sales of $5.5 billion. Amazon had $2.5 billion of sales in just books!
When I want a book on a specific subject I'll go to different stores to look at the available books, then once I decide what book to get I'll shop for the cheapest price.
'Different stores'? Well, I have...some Barnes and Noble, I have some Borders, which are the same price as B&N, also chain stores, and I have a B&N discount card, so I might as well go to B&N, and there's a single Book-a-Million, also a chain store, that I rather dislike the location of. (It's in a crappy mall in the middle of a nearby city I never go to.)
I think I've explained this clearly enough. You just read right past the part of my post where I explained I'm choosing to shop, physically, at B&N vs. some locally-owned new book store because Barnes and Nobles actually exists and the other does not. It is the same reason I choose to drive my car instead of flying around in my jetpack.
Both were converted houses. I moved away more than 10 years ago but one of the stores is still open, the Spiral Circle [spiralcircle.com].
And yes, if you live in Orlando Florida you there might, in fact, be an actual local bookstore you can buy books at. A city with an urban population of 2,054,574.
I live in a county with an population 1/100th of that. The whole county. And it's one of the more populated counties surrounding it.
Part of this nonsense is due to cliques, and part of it is due to the fact the mission statement is idiotic.
Wikipedia should have been split into a dozen difference sites ages ago. First thing to be split out: everything fictional
They don't belong in an encyclopedia anyway, and Wikipedia's 'notability' guidelines on that are sheer nonsense.
Please note I'm not trying to say that no one should document fictional stuff. I'm all for that, I have no problem at all. But it should be somewhere else.
Next thing to remove: 95% of the places. Again, doesn't belong in an encyclopedia, but in an almanac. One with some sort of map interface.
Well, yes, but my point is, that philosophical point is completely idiotic in this context.
Free speech may, or may not, include the right to put information in front of people who don't want it, and hence spamming may, or may not, be free speech. I lean towards 'Not' side of that, that people have the right to not be harassed, but whatever, it's moot.
Regardless of where you are on that opinion, free speech does not include the right to take other people and force them to speak for you to other people because everyone is slamming the door in your fucking face when you show up.
Which is, you know, what spammers are actually doing, with the botnets of hijacked machines. Let's stop worry about 'spam', and 'spammers'. Hell, let's just agree that doesn't even exist at all, and forbidding spam is an unconscionable restriction of freedom of speech, and everyone can crap all over everyone's computer all they want if they have an open SMTP port.
And then let's go lock up those people we used to call 'spammers' for hundreds of thousands of unauthorized access to a computer. (Which they then stupidly used to send an entirely legal 'spam' email, which resulted in us knowing they had hijacked that computer.)
Usually that's between one to six months in jail. For one access. So assuming we give them the lowest fine, that's about 10,000 years in jail. That sounds reasonable. Maybe only 7,000 with good behavior.
Forget 'spam'. 'Spam' is not something we need to track down and prosecute. Spam laws have idiotic penalties like fines and rules about opting in or out and marketers who try to clutter the definitions. We can deal with the non-hijacking spammers by simply blocking them from the internet, or blocking the people who give them access.
And the hijacking spammers we can lock up for the entire rest of their life without bothering with a single reference to 'spam' at all.
Almost any law can conceivable be stretched to cover some constitutionally protected activity.
But, perhaps more importantly, people only have the right to peaceably assemble.
And that word's in there for a reason. Sometimes assemblies turn into mobs, which are intentionally not-peaceful, and sometimes they turn into dangerous crowds, which are accidentally not-peaceful. (The first threaten people outside the group, the second threatens people in the group itself, if you see the distinction I'm making. Almost always one of the first is also the second...angry mobs often don't care if they trample their own people.)
But that logic doesn't work for, say, fire codes. It's very easy to have enough people to be over the limit in a building, and yet have everyone calm and even sitting down or whatever.
To figure that out, we need to look at the difference between 'public safety' in some abstract, which the government should not be elevating about the 1st amendment, and actual 'immediate safety of members of public'.
The latter is reasonable. The former is not. The right to 'life' is an inherent right on equal footing with the 1st amendment. (Yes, yes, it's in the Declaration of Independence, but it's certainly one of the unenumerated rights in the 9th amendment.)
He had no duty to send a Tweet, and will not face any penalty for refusing to do so, at least under an obstruction charge.
Right, but the courts can take how much you attempted to migrate the problem into account during sentencing.
If someone is in your house, and the ceiling fan falls on them for no reason, you're legally liable. But you are not required to call the hospital (In most jurisdictions, some you can be required to), you are not required to drive them there, you are not even required to give them an aspirin or a bandage. Hell, you don't even have to let them lay there on the floor, it's your property.
And if you don't do those things, and proudly stand in court and say you weren't required to do those things by law, they will ream your ass in the lawsuit, because it looks very very bad.
Why don't you actually show me a locally owned new bookstore?
Let's see, in town, there's the antique bookstore in town that has absolutely nothing I'd be interested, and yes, I've checked. There used to be a microscopic other used bookstore in town, that had had maybe 200 books total, and that wasn't even worth the two minutes I spent in it.
There's the Humpus Bumpus used bookstore 35 minutes away that I've actually purchased all the books I even slightly want from it. I go back in there about once a year to see if there's anything interesting.
There was also another used book store, 35 minutes away, but it sold all the books to someone else and closed. It was actually crap, through, full of decaying moldy hardbacks from the 80s with acidified paper. I went in there a dozen times, I think I bought two books.
And various other book exchanges I go into, but, of course, none of them have anything new.
That, you see, is the problem. I'm all for used book stores. I go in different ones all the time.
But there is not, and has never been, a new non-chain bookstore anywhere around here. Why don't you point me to a new book store even slightly in driving distance that isn't another chain? I live in the zip code 30533, in the Northeast Georgia mountain.
I'm driving 40 minutes to get to Barnes and Nobles as it is. (There's a bookstore, Books-a-Million, that is 5-10 minutes closer in the theory, but much further in traffic. And is also a chain.) Before that one opened, I had to drive 50-55 minutes to a book store.
Big box stores do make local businesses go out of business...if they bothered to exist in the first place. Here, local new bookstores do not exist at all. They never have.
I probably got it before you, I think I've had it a year at this point.
$100 is normally the spot I aim at, but I had some extra cash last time, because cost of the memory and motherboard suddenly dropped before I bought, so went about $50 higher than normal.
Yeah. I paid about 150 for my graphics card, a 9600 GT, I have a nice 1680x1050 monitor I'm not going to upgrade any time soon, and at this point I can't imagine what games would require me to buy a new CPU.
I can run any game whatsoever at full resolution and visual details.
That's always been the joke...if you buy a middling video card, you're buying the same thing that's in a PS3 or whatever the newest console is, because those were created a year ago.
Walmart is my last resort shop. I don't like how they treat their employees. (I say that as an ex-employee.) I only go there if other places are closed, or simply do not have what I need.
I buy books from Barnes and Nobles, not Amazon, because I like to support brick and mortar book stores. I buy both online and in the store.
I did buy something from Amazon a year ago, the first time ever, I forget what it was...I think a video game. (B&N online doesn't actually sell video games, they just pretend they do...that's actually GameStop selling through them.)
I suspect the 'twitter' thing was the police telling him to ask more people not show up, via twitter.
That said, his refusing was not illegal, the police can't make people say things. Which is why he wasn't charged for anything like that.
But failing to try to migrate the danger during a mob (By directing people elsewhere) will almost certainly adversely affect his defense on the actual charges in court.
If there's a dangerous situation that you created and are in charge of, and the police are taking control and ask you to do something, well, often, they don't have legal grounds to make you do that thing, and you can refuse if you want.
And then you'll stand in front of the jury as the police recount that, while the danger's creation might have been unknowing, even after you were apprised of the danger of the situation, you knowingly refused to do things to migrate the danger. And, well, welcome to jail for creating that danger in the first place.
Whereas if, when you were told the crowd was turning into a mob, you made every effort to fix the situation, you often won't be charged at all, or just given a small fine.
This guy got arrested because he set up an event he knew would draw huge crowds, it did, he was in charge of the crowd, and he has no safety measures and wouldn't tell them to disperse. (Via any means.)
Sorry, despite freedom of speech and assembly, people don't have the right to set up giant panicky dangerous packed mob. You want to address a huge crowd, you put it somewhere a huge crowd can fit, with actual crowd control measures.
WRT to the twitting, it's likely the police were asking him to get people to stop showing up, not asking the existing crowd to do anything.
Or to put it another way: Free speech may, indeed, include the right to talk even when people don't want to talk to you.
It does not include the right to grab unwilling sleeping people, stick your hand up their ass, and use them as meat puppets to talk to people who will slam the door in your face if they knew who was really talking to.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't need capital punishment, or other such things.
We just need to enforce the laws exactly as they stand. It's something like a minimum of six months in prison for each access, so in practice spammers would end up in prison for thousands of years.
Of course, parole and good behavior would mean they could get out in 200-300 years...we're not heartless.
That the risk/reward structure is so far out of wack is very puzzling. You think some state DA would have a lot of fun arresting one of these guys and charging (and convicting them) of the thousands of unauthorized access made in that state.
Can you imagine the ads they would run for reelection based on their conviction ratio? 'On average, DA in this state have a 80% conviction rate of about 300 felonies. I managed to convict people of 99.92% of the 3000 felony charges I bought. And I did it with the same budget. Reelect me in 2010...'
Well, yes, but mugging is also an economic problem. Something like three quarters of all crimes are economically based.
I don't really see what that has to do with anything.
Yeah, I noticed that after I posted.
I copied and pasted that text from the Spamhous link, and it's wrong there too...clearly, some OCR went wrong at some point. ;)
I'm against spam and sparn. And sparm, while we're at it.
According to the original documentation, 'In early 2008, a security company identified one botnet -- which it dubbed "Mega-D" -- that sent sparn promoting Affking's VPXL and King Replica products as the worst botnet in the world, accounting for 32% of all spam.'
The Mega-D botnet consisted at least 264,784 computers.
That's 264,784 UNAUTHORIZED COMPUTER ACCESS FELONIES.
Why the FUCK are we 'fining' someone who committed at least 264,784 felonies? We invade goddamn countries and charge people with war crimes for that level of criminality!
Anti-spam laws are nonsense. Forget the damn anti-spam laws. Lock them up for the felonies they're committing. Extradition would be a lot easier, too. (Of course, we could just find a few hundred IPs this guy hijacked in Australia, turn them over, and have him locked up there his entire life, instead.)
...the problem is that software patents don't work like actual patents.
I made a rant about this some time ago and put it on my mostly defunct blog. I will summarize:
Actual patents have industries making an choice to use them. 'Should we license this tech for 4 cents an item from a competitor, and save 10, or should we attempt to research our own way, or maybe we should research on top of their patent so we can cross license our addition back for the original patent'.
It is an actual, calculated decision.
Software patents, OTOH, fall into two categories. The first is 'patents that should not be issued'. These aren't even actual 'software' patents, they're 'patents on how computers get used', idiotic things like RSS feeds and one-click shopping, stuff that isn't original in any way, shape, or idea, and should never have exists.
But let's forget about those, and talk about reasonable patents, like on MP3 encoding and stuff like that. That specific one is 'Here is a process to strip out audio information from a file and still have it sound mostly the same to people'. It's certainly patentable, it required a lot of scientific research, and it doesn't attempt to cover all ways to strip audio information and reduce the size of a file, just a single specific one.
The problem there is programmers don't choose to use a patented process and pay royalties. Ever. If they hit a (reasonable) patent, they just spend a little more time and effort, and perhaps a bit more CPU and filesize, and work around it.
It's only when they don't know they're using a patent that they just one. And then, a decade later, when it becomes popular, suddenly everyone realizes it's patented.
People would have invented their own method of doing that, but now it's too late, everyone is using that format, and we're all screwed.
Software patents are all either a) too broad, and shouldn't be issued, or b) submarine ones. The actual legitimate situation of real patents, where engineers choose to use the patent, or use something else, is entirely nonexistent.
It doesn't have anything to do with 'hidden APIs'.
There are plenty of apps that are rejected for dumb things, and even more apps that are rejected for simply giving people too much control over their phone.
There are plenty of apps that don't use standard APIs, but that's not the reason people jailbreak their phone. They jailbreak their phone because they want to run ScummVM or be able to background process or use VoIP over 3g, all of which are using entirely standard APIs yet breaking the 'rules' of the iPhone.
The vast majority of pirated iPhone games are played exactly once, too.
Which either means the app sucked, or it means that the pirates just stuck a copy on their phone for bragging rights and never played it.
'iPhone' can also be a verb without too much work. (phone already is.)
Perhaps a comma was missing and it should have read:
[implied I] iPhone App Store Rejects, Find a New Home.
I.e., perhaps someone was looking for a new place for their app, and looked in the phone book and found a place called "App Store Rejects".
So they meant: 'I called (on my iPhone, and I am a Apple brand whore), a place called "App Store Rejects", and I found a new home for my app by doing that'.
(Or perhaps it was 'ape store reject', and that was a typo, and the story is about calling about animals being turned out from pet stores.)
Or perhaps it was actually:
iPhone, Apps Store Rejects, Find[s] a New Home
With two missing commas and some subject/verb disagreement, it would fit right in as a slashdot headline. And of course they rejected an iPhone, it's a download store, you can't sell used iPhones on it.
Every time I read headlines, I think about the Discworld book 'The Truth' and the hilarious comments about headlines in it.
You have come up with some imaginary reason I don't shop at Amazon, and then have come up with reasons this imaginary reason you invented is wrong. This is incredibly annoying. Giving a reason that I shop somewhere does not mean I REFUSE to shop elsewhere.
And, of course, it doesn't help that your reason, than B&N is a 'bigger big box retailer', is just flat out silly. As you just agreed, Amazon is actually much bigger, so if I actually had some sort of moral objection to large stores, by any logic I should be shopping at B&N anyway. (Actually Books-A-Million would be the best choice, I think.)
But, in actual fact, I have no problem with Amazon at all, as I've stated repeated, as I stated in my original post, which was me agreeing that Amazon was a better place to shop than Walmart. Although I don't care about how big a store is, I refuse to patronize Walmart for entirely different reasons.
I just prefer to patronize brick and morter stores, and, when I can't make it to them or need something they don't have in stock, their online version. This is because brick and morter stores are in serious danger of dying off in my area, and I'll gladly pay an extra 10% if it continues to mean such stores will continue to exist.
Plus, I do have a moral objection to the way online stores manage to have lower prices because they just blithely have customers defraud states out of sales tax. That isn't really Amazon's fault, but there is a false savings there predicated on people not manually paying sales tax like they are supposed to.
In your original post I replied to you say nothing what so ever about there being no locally owned bookstores. It wasn't until I asked why you weren't buying from them until you said there were none. Now what's the possibility you would have said that if I had not asked?
Yeah, and if this was my original reply to you saying 'You should stop at local stores', I would probably make a joke about how there aren't any local new book stores, and proceed to list the total lack of them.
Oh, like I did.
You then proceeded to assert I was 'refusing' to buy from Amazon and that decision was based on some sort of wrongness or something. And then talk about how I was shopping at 'bigger box retailers' while you choose to shop elsewhere, totally ignoring the fact I wasn't 'choosing' to shop at B&N vs. smaller stores.
You are asserting Magento takes 2-3 times longer to modify than OSCommerce.
Okay, that is theoretically possible.
To insert a random car analogy, that's sorta like asserting that a Hummer is a more fuel efficient vehicle than a FooMobile. That is theoretically possible, as I've never see or even heard of a FooMobile, so perhaps FooMobiles come attached to an immovable building, for example. But that does not mean you should go around recommending a Hummer for fuel efficiency.
I can't even begin to comprehend how brain damaged a system takes longer to modify than OSCommerce would be.
I recommend you look at Joomla w/Virtuemart if you think that OSCommerce, of all things, is the easiest to modify. There's a lot of files, but almost all that's Joomla...virtuemart is in administrator/componants/com_virtumart/, and is 500 files _max_, and actually organized in directories.
There's also a Drupal solution that is apparently okay, but I don't know Drupal that well.
No namespacing.
What you mean is that PHP doesn't force namespaces. It has them, just no one uses them.
No Asynchronous execution.
That is not particularly relevant for a web programming language where a new process starts, runs code, and exits. You can't safely have background threads in that circumstances. It makes it really hard to write daemons in, but not for web programming.
Non-standard date formats
This just baffles me. Do you mean the DateTime object?
I've always stored dates as a Unix timestamp in PHP.
Dangerous stuff like "Global"
That is a valid point.
Without Zend-acceleration its incredibly slow.
All languages can be incredibly slow if you run them wrong.
If you're not using eAccelerator or Zend or Xcache or another bytecode cacher, you're running PHP wrong.
Now, you want to argue that a bytecode cache should be included within PHP, just like it's in Python and whatever, go right ahead.
Amen. It is amazing how popular total crap is, sometimes. It got there first, and, by God, people will continue to use it five years later no matter what's come out in the meantime.
I will point out this isn't entirely the fault of PHP. It happens in other languages too. Two words: BIND and sendmail.
VirtueMart works. It's a Joomla component.
Or, at least, works a heck of a lot better than OSCommerce, which is completely unmanageable to edit.
Also, the OSCommerce people seem utterly unable to actually make releases. The current release candidate is almost two years old at this point.
As usual, they're devoting their time to the alpha of the next version, and any complaints about bugs will direct you to the cvs server. Heaven forbid people want an actual functioning piece of software.
Oh, and as a fun feature, a hole was discovered in OSCommerce 6 months ago. They haven't even updated the release candidate, or provided a patch. Their instructions for fixing the hole is to .htaccess protect the admin directory. Nice security, you retarded monkeys.
Virtuemart, OTOH, is not very 'good', but only in the sense it's not very featurefull. For example, you can't sell serial numbers, for a feature I've wanted. But I was able to add that in, as the code was actually understandable, unlike OSCommerce's code. It's a basic start of a system that works fine for what it does, and PHP coding can take it wherever you want.
It actually has reasonable templates, and the fact it's inside Joomla means you're just templating the content part, and the rest of it is just the Joomla template.
My biggest complaint is that, because of having to add features, I have found it hard to upgrade, which I guess is as much my fault as anyone elses.
I haven't checked out this Magento yet.
HAHA! You refuse to buy from Amazon but patronize a bigger big box retailer.
I don't 'refuse' to buy from Amazon at all. I refuse to buy from Walmart, I just don't buy from Amazon. (And my moral problem with Walmart has nothing to do with their habit of crowding out competitors, it is how they treat their workers that I dislike.)
I buy from B&N because, although it sometimes costs more, it also supports actual physical bookstores, which in my part of the world, almost do not exist at all. I am afraid that if Amazon keeps growing, local bookstores will cease to exist.
However, only crazy people think B&N is bigger than Amazon.
B&N had sales of $1.2 billion last quarter. Amazon had sales of $5.5 billion. Amazon had $2.5 billion of sales in just books!
When I want a book on a specific subject I'll go to different stores to look at the available books, then once I decide what book to get I'll shop for the cheapest price.
'Different stores'? Well, I have...some Barnes and Noble, I have some Borders, which are the same price as B&N, also chain stores, and I have a B&N discount card, so I might as well go to B&N, and there's a single Book-a-Million, also a chain store, that I rather dislike the location of. (It's in a crappy mall in the middle of a nearby city I never go to.)
I think I've explained this clearly enough. You just read right past the part of my post where I explained I'm choosing to shop, physically, at B&N vs. some locally-owned new book store because Barnes and Nobles actually exists and the other does not. It is the same reason I choose to drive my car instead of flying around in my jetpack.
Both were converted houses. I moved away more than 10 years ago but one of the stores is still open, the Spiral Circle [spiralcircle.com].
And yes, if you live in Orlando Florida you there might, in fact, be an actual local bookstore you can buy books at. A city with an urban population of 2,054,574.
I live in a county with an population 1/100th of that. The whole county. And it's one of the more populated counties surrounding it.
Indeed.
Part of this nonsense is due to cliques, and part of it is due to the fact the mission statement is idiotic.
Wikipedia should have been split into a dozen difference sites ages ago. First thing to be split out: everything fictional
They don't belong in an encyclopedia anyway, and Wikipedia's 'notability' guidelines on that are sheer nonsense.
Please note I'm not trying to say that no one should document fictional stuff. I'm all for that, I have no problem at all. But it should be somewhere else.
Next thing to remove: 95% of the places. Again, doesn't belong in an encyclopedia, but in an almanac. One with some sort of map interface.
Well, yes, but my point is, that philosophical point is completely idiotic in this context.
Free speech may, or may not, include the right to put information in front of people who don't want it, and hence spamming may, or may not, be free speech. I lean towards 'Not' side of that, that people have the right to not be harassed, but whatever, it's moot.
Regardless of where you are on that opinion, free speech does not include the right to take other people and force them to speak for you to other people because everyone is slamming the door in your fucking face when you show up.
Which is, you know, what spammers are actually doing, with the botnets of hijacked machines. Let's stop worry about 'spam', and 'spammers'. Hell, let's just agree that doesn't even exist at all, and forbidding spam is an unconscionable restriction of freedom of speech, and everyone can crap all over everyone's computer all they want if they have an open SMTP port.
And then let's go lock up those people we used to call 'spammers' for hundreds of thousands of unauthorized access to a computer. (Which they then stupidly used to send an entirely legal 'spam' email, which resulted in us knowing they had hijacked that computer.)
Usually that's between one to six months in jail. For one access. So assuming we give them the lowest fine, that's about 10,000 years in jail. That sounds reasonable. Maybe only 7,000 with good behavior.
Forget 'spam'. 'Spam' is not something we need to track down and prosecute. Spam laws have idiotic penalties like fines and rules about opting in or out and marketers who try to clutter the definitions. We can deal with the non-hijacking spammers by simply blocking them from the internet, or blocking the people who give them access.
And the hijacking spammers we can lock up for the entire rest of their life without bothering with a single reference to 'spam' at all.
Almost any law can conceivable be stretched to cover some constitutionally protected activity.
But, perhaps more importantly, people only have the right to peaceably assemble.
And that word's in there for a reason. Sometimes assemblies turn into mobs, which are intentionally not-peaceful, and sometimes they turn into dangerous crowds, which are accidentally not-peaceful. (The first threaten people outside the group, the second threatens people in the group itself, if you see the distinction I'm making. Almost always one of the first is also the second...angry mobs often don't care if they trample their own people.)
But that logic doesn't work for, say, fire codes. It's very easy to have enough people to be over the limit in a building, and yet have everyone calm and even sitting down or whatever.
To figure that out, we need to look at the difference between 'public safety' in some abstract, which the government should not be elevating about the 1st amendment, and actual 'immediate safety of members of public'.
The latter is reasonable. The former is not. The right to 'life' is an inherent right on equal footing with the 1st amendment. (Yes, yes, it's in the Declaration of Independence, but it's certainly one of the unenumerated rights in the 9th amendment.)
He had no duty to send a Tweet, and will not face any penalty for refusing to do so, at least under an obstruction charge.
Right, but the courts can take how much you attempted to migrate the problem into account during sentencing.
If someone is in your house, and the ceiling fan falls on them for no reason, you're legally liable. But you are not required to call the hospital (In most jurisdictions, some you can be required to), you are not required to drive them there, you are not even required to give them an aspirin or a bandage. Hell, you don't even have to let them lay there on the floor, it's your property.
And if you don't do those things, and proudly stand in court and say you weren't required to do those things by law, they will ream your ass in the lawsuit, because it looks very very bad.
HA! Locally owned bookstores. That's a laugh.
Why don't you actually show me a locally owned new bookstore?
Let's see, in town, there's the antique bookstore in town that has absolutely nothing I'd be interested, and yes, I've checked. There used to be a microscopic other used bookstore in town, that had had maybe 200 books total, and that wasn't even worth the two minutes I spent in it.
There's the Humpus Bumpus used bookstore 35 minutes away that I've actually purchased all the books I even slightly want from it. I go back in there about once a year to see if there's anything interesting.
There was also another used book store, 35 minutes away, but it sold all the books to someone else and closed. It was actually crap, through, full of decaying moldy hardbacks from the 80s with acidified paper. I went in there a dozen times, I think I bought two books.
And various other book exchanges I go into, but, of course, none of them have anything new.
That, you see, is the problem. I'm all for used book stores. I go in different ones all the time.
But there is not, and has never been, a new non-chain bookstore anywhere around here. Why don't you point me to a new book store even slightly in driving distance that isn't another chain? I live in the zip code 30533, in the Northeast Georgia mountain.
I'm driving 40 minutes to get to Barnes and Nobles as it is. (There's a bookstore, Books-a-Million, that is 5-10 minutes closer in the theory, but much further in traffic. And is also a chain.) Before that one opened, I had to drive 50-55 minutes to a book store.
Big box stores do make local businesses go out of business...if they bothered to exist in the first place. Here, local new bookstores do not exist at all. They never have.
I probably got it before you, I think I've had it a year at this point.
$100 is normally the spot I aim at, but I had some extra cash last time, because cost of the memory and motherboard suddenly dropped before I bought, so went about $50 higher than normal.
Yeah. I paid about 150 for my graphics card, a 9600 GT, I have a nice 1680x1050 monitor I'm not going to upgrade any time soon, and at this point I can't imagine what games would require me to buy a new CPU.
I can run any game whatsoever at full resolution and visual details.
That's always been the joke...if you buy a middling video card, you're buying the same thing that's in a PS3 or whatever the newest console is, because those were created a year ago.
Indeed. Same here.
Walmart is my last resort shop. I don't like how they treat their employees. (I say that as an ex-employee.) I only go there if other places are closed, or simply do not have what I need.
I buy books from Barnes and Nobles, not Amazon, because I like to support brick and mortar book stores. I buy both online and in the store.
I did buy something from Amazon a year ago, the first time ever, I forget what it was...I think a video game. (B&N online doesn't actually sell video games, they just pretend they do...that's actually GameStop selling through them.)
I suspect the 'twitter' thing was the police telling him to ask more people not show up, via twitter.
That said, his refusing was not illegal, the police can't make people say things. Which is why he wasn't charged for anything like that.
But failing to try to migrate the danger during a mob (By directing people elsewhere) will almost certainly adversely affect his defense on the actual charges in court.
If there's a dangerous situation that you created and are in charge of, and the police are taking control and ask you to do something, well, often, they don't have legal grounds to make you do that thing, and you can refuse if you want.
And then you'll stand in front of the jury as the police recount that, while the danger's creation might have been unknowing, even after you were apprised of the danger of the situation, you knowingly refused to do things to migrate the danger. And, well, welcome to jail for creating that danger in the first place.
Whereas if, when you were told the crowd was turning into a mob, you made every effort to fix the situation, you often won't be charged at all, or just given a small fine.
'The police' aren't focused on it. The media are.
This guy got arrested because he set up an event he knew would draw huge crowds, it did, he was in charge of the crowd, and he has no safety measures and wouldn't tell them to disperse. (Via any means.)
Sorry, despite freedom of speech and assembly, people don't have the right to set up giant panicky dangerous packed mob. You want to address a huge crowd, you put it somewhere a huge crowd can fit, with actual crowd control measures.
WRT to the twitting, it's likely the police were asking him to get people to stop showing up, not asking the existing crowd to do anything.
Or to put it another way: Free speech may, indeed, include the right to talk even when people don't want to talk to you.
It does not include the right to grab unwilling sleeping people, stick your hand up their ass, and use them as meat puppets to talk to people who will slam the door in your face if they knew who was really talking to.