Despite common perception, the IRS is actually pretty reasonable to work with, if you're not trying to cheat them out of their Congress-determined fair cut.
The difficulty comes in determining exactly what that fair cut is, given all the many ways to get income, and the many more ways to hide that income.
So in other words, you want your juries to be vigilante posses, who determine guilt not by impartial facts, but by prejudice and bias, simply repeating the verdict handed to them by the Court of Public Opinion. You'd be right, though. With that kind of jury, you don't need to have any legal education to argue a case. You just have to slander the other guy convincingly enough while confirming the jury's prejudice.
Clearly, making a violent video game is worthy of punishment, because all the parents on the jury can see the connection between their teenagers' gaming habits and their recent distant attitudes.
Obviously, this man is not a rapist because the woman accepted his offer of a drink. As all the barflies will affirm, that's a binding social contract.
This white man should go free, because setting a black man on fire is free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Where exactly do you draw the line regarding which biases are acceptable? Which school of thought regarding "constitutional law" are jurors allowed to know about? After the complete injustice of the Zimmerman trial, would a similar trial have any chance of justice, were it tried on preexisting "knowledge" rather than the facts of the case?
In a Ponzi Scheme, the founders persuade investors that they’ll profit. Bitcoin does not make such a guarantee. There is no central entity, just individuals building an economy.
So they're not promising anything, therefore they can't break their promises. This does not affect anything about how the scheme actually works.
A ponzi scheme is a zero sum game. Early adopters can only profit at the expense of late adopters. Bitcoin has possible win-win outcomes. Early adopters profit from the rise in value. Late adopters, and indeed, society as a whole, benefit from the usefulness of a stable, fast, inexpensive, and widely accepted p2p currency.
This assumes that the "usefulness" actually exists and is beneficial. So far, Bitcoin hasn't been stable, fast, or widely-accepted, so the win-win scenario they propose isn't actually possible. I can just as easily say that by everyone giving me all of their money, society will benefit because I will donate everybody's money all at once to a charity, reducing the charity's overhead costs.
The fact that early adopters benefit more doesn't alone make anything a Ponzi scheme. All good investments in successful companies have this quality.
This is true, because the FAQ writer doesn't seem to understand what a Ponzi scheme is in the first place. In a Ponzi scheme, the investment capital of latecomers is used to pay the returns of the early investors.
When you invest in a company, your money is pooled with everyone else's to run the company. The company also has a pool of profit, which is often split proportionally for dividends. You can also get a return by selling your stake in the company to someone else who wants to be involved. At no point are investments used to pay out returns to earlier shareholders.
Bitcoin as a whole fits the Ponzi scheme pattern, because at the exchanges the money used to pay off the early miners comes directly from people now buying coins. Since the Bitcoin market is so much smaller than the price of the Bitcoin supply, the main mechanism that external value comes into the Bitcoin economy is by investors trying to get into the scheme for its high (not-guaranteed) returns.
The only real distinction between a Ponzi scheme and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin has no single master, that we know of. Ponzi schemes usually have a single person or small group promoting the investment. Bitcoin doesn't have any organized leadership, but rather relies on the self-sustaining marketing buzz of zealots. That makes it a better fit for an economic bubble, rather than an actual Ponzi scheme.
The teacher in question could be in his early 70s. That's not unheard of, if he's in good health. That would mean he was an infant in the 1940's, and his mother could have left him in the care of sympathetic friends before the Nazis took her away. I'm told it was fairly common for Jews in Europe to make such arrangements as the Nazi threat moved closer.
My thoughts exactly. The picture itself has no context, and the article is the usual InfoWars style with lots of supposedly-self-evident cherry-picked anecdotes and no logic*. I'm going to assume that the problem in the picture is actually demonstrating an aspect of the transitive property. The intended solution is the realization that "15 - 5 - 2 = 15 - 7", or to state it as an abstract concept, "numbers represent quantities that may be separated and redistributed". Of course, parents whose education was all rote memorization don't understand the questions, so they're unable to help effectively, and in some cases can undermine the lesson entirely be asserting that the textbook is obviously wrong.
* I'm curious; is there an actual name for this style of presentation? I've seen it often in conspiracy theories, where a series of images, statements, and facts are presented without context to outrage the audience, then the author's theory is presented as the only context where everything makes sense, rather than allowing for each item's individual context to be understood first. It's common enough that I feel there must be some literary term for it, but I don't recall any.
What the hell does coloring a picture of a clock teach a second grader exactly?
The layout and parts of a clock face, and familiarity with the object. It's the first phase in learning any technology: understanding that it is not magic. The clock isn't a magical disk that telepathically communicates time to adults' heads, or just a moving wall decoration that's been there since before the kid was born. It is a mechanism for a purpose, and a thing of importance to be studied.
Consider similar exercises for other subjects. The first exercise in many programming languages is "Hello, World!", for the purpose of showing a minimal program that doesn't use any special features of the language.
Once exposed to a concept, the additional time spent coloring or reviewing strengthens the connections to related concepts. When coloring the minute hand, the student remembers that each number the minute hand passes represents five minutes. The Hollywood idea of rapid learning doesn't work too well in reality. Repetition and reinforcement are the keys to learning something and retaining it beyond the end of the school year.
SparkFun is in the business of selling DIY electronics. They're more like a modern Heath.
They're out the original shipment, but Fluke stepped in with an absolutely unnecessary act of goodwill. Now SparkFun's broken even, because they still have multimeters to sell to make their business, and the customers that would have bought the original ones still want multimeters, and now SparkFun has the Fluke brand, to boot...
But this is no longer in the hands of the inventory people. This is marketing. Sure, SparkFun could probably sell the multimeters at a very nice profit, but that's not their business. They're selling electronics in general, so they thrive on the repeat business rather than one-time equipment sales. Giving away these multimeters to loyal customers is a nice way to build their own brand loyalty.
Fluke looks like the good guy. SparkFun gets cheap viral marketing. Everybody's walking away happy.
I think that's a pretty sweet deal for Sparcfun. They violated a trademark and they're not suffering one bit from it. The company whose trademark they infringed is the one losing money.
...but Fluke apparently considers it worth the cost to be the good guy.
Never one to assume malice, my guess is that it was a temporary wallet used for short-term transfer of funds. Back when I worked in finance, we fairly often set up accounts for a few days, just to receive an incoming transfer or to send out funds from the right name. Those accounts, by their published nature, became targets for attack. It was always enlightening when a client sent in an emailed request to withdraw money from the temporary account, after we'd just closed the account as planned a few days before.
Similarly, I'm thinking the wallet was opened, used, then emptied, but stuck around on their servers. It'd make a convenient place to hide stolen coins (regardless of who stole them). Those malleable transactions could be used to skim coins and push them into the wallet. If noticed, any investigation into the wallet would reveal that it was just an internal account, conducting low-volume business as usual. The thieves could then transfer the coins out at their leisure, in small similarly-innocuous amounts.
Then everything collapses, and the company faces bankruptcy. Step one is to look at every asset the company has, and figure out whatever value it may have. Naturally, that would include explicitly checking each wallet, rather than just relying on what the database says the balance is. Lo and behold, one wallet has coins still in it, and the company might have assets to cover its debts, which is exactly why that search is the first step.
Consider that to be an engineer requires 4 years of 'work' during high school (unpaid). 5 years of college (also unpaid and requiring taking on debt). 2-3 years work experience. That's probably an investment of 15000-25000 hours. An investment worth 3/4 to a 1.25 million dollars. Certainly a 5-10% return on investment is very reasonable right? Well that's 50-100k per year.
Checking the math...
Let's assume 50 40-hour productive work weeks each year. High-school work isn't as good as college, which isn't as good as professional work, so we'll assume wages of $10, $20, and $30, respectively.
High school is 4 years * 50 weeks/year * 40 hours/week * 10 dollars/hour. That's $80,000. College is 5 years (assuming a 1-year master program) * 50 weeks/year * 40 hours/week * 20 dollars/hour. That's $200,000. A fresh graduate therefore has invested $280,000 in time with no return. Then they enter the workforce, and start getting the return.
The entry-level position is 3 years * 50 weeks/year * 40 hours/week * 30 dollars/hour. That's $180,000, but the subject is actually being paid for their time, now. Rather than adding that to the investment cost, that's the first three years of returns. We'll extrapolate that out for further insight.
After a total of five years in the workforce, even without any raises, the investment is fully reimbursed, and any additional returns are profit (reaching 7% ROI in ten years). In contrast, the employee could have simply dropped out of high school, and worked at $10 the whole time. That comes out to $20,000 per year, compared to the college track now earning $60,000 per year, so there's a profit of $40,000 per year for a college education.
With the initial investment cost of $280,000, the time investment in college is recouped in 7 years. Add a $40,000 investment cost for tuition and other expenses, and the investment is recouped in 8 years, still assuming a constant $60,000 income.
Of course, then there's taxes. Interestingly, since taxes aren't being paid during schooling, that actually lowers the relative value of the time being invested. Rather than an education costing $280,000 in lost income, it only costs $168,000 in post-tax lost income, assuming a 40% flat tax. Even with the lower take-home pay rate, that cost is recovered in only six years, and after ten years the ROI is 11%.
Your estimate of $50k to $100k to get a 5% to 10% ROI is close, but extreme. The low end of the salary range puts you in the high end of the return. However, the estimate of $750,000 for an education doesn't seem to make sense. Perhaps that's why a 6-figure salary for every employee seems unreasonable to the political and management folks - they've already done the math.
Of course, math is only a part of the issue. The costs and profits involved here are assuming that $10/hour is an acceptable baseline for wages. We've assumed that without a high school education, a baseline employee could sustain a $20,000 annual income, but we have not considered whether this is a suitable income for an acceptable standard of living in the modern age. That, however, is a discussion for another time.
Yet, whenever someone talks about raising H-1B limits, there's the inevitable concern about how the flood of cheap labor will drive down salaries. The other perspective is that STEM salaries are already overinflated, and bringing in foreigners will keep labor costs at reasonable rates.
Steady salaries just indicate that any disparity between labor supply and demand is also remaining steady.
Fine. s/magic quotes/mysql_real_escape_string()/g... or if you prefer, preg_replace('/magic quotes/g', 'mysql_real_escape_string()', $post);
That's deprecated too, but I'd bet there's still folks out there clinging desperately to it and using it daily in production code.
Also, you should consider that I don't keep track of PHP's changes, because they'd have to change most of the language for it to be salvageable. I'm not trolling with outdated FUD; I'm arguing with one almost-outdated fact. It's almost outdated because PHP 5.3.8 is still distributed.
I'm pretty sure that's Perl. You can define something first as a scalar, then refer to it as an array, because HA HA I WAS JUST KIDDING!
You can also take a single variable and make it behave entirely differently depending on context. As a scalar, it works fine, but if you try to refer to it as an array, rm -rf/.
Not saying you'd want to do those things, but you can.
In fact, most PHP files are already valid Hack files.
No, no, no, and no.
The single biggest problem with PHP is the tendency for old code and old programmers to keep their bad habits around when moving to new projects. PHP lacked vital modern features (like static typing and namespaces) for so long, and it's evolved so many workarounds (like magic quotes), that programmers have learned the wrong way to accomplish basic tasks. Now they have a new language, supporting the right way to do these things... but the old and broken ways still work. Sure, there will be a few programmers that will use the new way and be thrilled about the good technique, but then time crunches will set in, and code reviews will be rushed (or nonexistent), and those old ways will creep in, bringing the bugs with them.
Backwards-compatibility with a broken language is a great way to improve a new language's adoption, and a terrible way to build a new language's reputation.
Sorry, officer... I didn't know it was illegal to murder people. No, I don't watch TV or read much, why do you ask? Look, I've had an IQ test and I was above average, so if you can't make a law clear enough that I'd know it, the law is wrong, and I must be innocent.
Oh, you want to judge based on common sense? Whose opinion are we going to use for that? Mine, or that enraged mob you've brought over there?
The only way you could have stopped them was to gu[a]rantee that you would retaliate
...or use diplomacy to convince the madman that it's really not in his best interest to launch them, but that's never been a popular option here on Slashdot.
The missiles are in the air. How do you stop them?
Talk nicely to the madman, and question whether such a measurement is really important enough to kill thousands, if not millions, of innocent people. Perhaps the madman will stop the attack on his own. Perhaps other madmen will see the insanity of such massive death over such trivial disputes, and reconsider their own nuclear warfare plans. In short, keep playing on the moral high ground.
Meanwhile, launch every kind of interception technology you have against the missiles. There have been successes in this area, with varying degrees of efficacy and danger. In the best case, you stop the attack and maintain both population and the moral high ground that brings allies in the imminent war. In the worst case, you're just as dead as you were without interception, but you still have those allies who can share the righteous outrage that someone would dare nuke someone who didn't even fire back, and since much of the US arsenal is either protected from attack or spread across wide areas of otherwise-uninteresting landscape, most of it will still be ready for use by the valiant defender who really didn't want to fight, but now must.
What was so scary about the Cold War was that talking wasn't a viable option. If someone got too offended, it was the end. The standing orders were that if a missile was detected, a retaliation would launch. There would be no confirmation and no superior reviewing orders. We came incredibly close to an all-out nuclear war on multiple occasions, each time saved by someone refusing to return fire against what were ultimately found to be false alarms. We now call these folks "heroes", not "pushovers".
There are those, myself included, that would consider talking to be a strength.
Right up to getting vaporized, there are several alternative options for stopping nukes that don't involve vaporizing even more innocent civilians. Talking our way out is one of the least hazardous and least expensive methods, and it has the added benefit of being done in parallel with other methods like interception and diversion.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite common perception, the IRS is actually pretty reasonable to work with, if you're not trying to cheat them out of their Congress-determined fair cut.
The difficulty comes in determining exactly what that fair cut is, given all the many ways to get income, and the many more ways to hide that income.
So in other words, you want your juries to be vigilante posses, who determine guilt not by impartial facts, but by prejudice and bias, simply repeating the verdict handed to them by the Court of Public Opinion. You'd be right, though. With that kind of jury, you don't need to have any legal education to argue a case. You just have to slander the other guy convincingly enough while confirming the jury's prejudice.
Where exactly do you draw the line regarding which biases are acceptable? Which school of thought regarding "constitutional law" are jurors allowed to know about? After the complete injustice of the Zimmerman trial, would a similar trial have any chance of justice, were it tried on preexisting "knowledge" rather than the facts of the case?
Aw, they fixed it. The summary originally read "which attempts to education journalists".
I doubt Sarten-X has an editor budget.
Somewhere in here, there's a joke about FLOSS text editors and the ensuing flame wars, but I just can't think of a good way to phrase it.
I have a plugin that could help with that phrasing, but I don't remember how to run it...
This story brought to you by Slashdot, which barely attempts to editing.
In a Ponzi Scheme, the founders persuade investors that they’ll profit. Bitcoin does not make such a guarantee. There is no central entity, just individuals building an economy.
So they're not promising anything, therefore they can't break their promises. This does not affect anything about how the scheme actually works.
A ponzi scheme is a zero sum game. Early adopters can only profit at the expense of late adopters. Bitcoin has possible win-win outcomes. Early adopters profit from the rise in value. Late adopters, and indeed, society as a whole, benefit from the usefulness of a stable, fast, inexpensive, and widely accepted p2p currency.
This assumes that the "usefulness" actually exists and is beneficial. So far, Bitcoin hasn't been stable, fast, or widely-accepted, so the win-win scenario they propose isn't actually possible. I can just as easily say that by everyone giving me all of their money, society will benefit because I will donate everybody's money all at once to a charity, reducing the charity's overhead costs.
The fact that early adopters benefit more doesn't alone make anything a Ponzi scheme. All good investments in successful companies have this quality.
This is true, because the FAQ writer doesn't seem to understand what a Ponzi scheme is in the first place. In a Ponzi scheme, the investment capital of latecomers is used to pay the returns of the early investors.
When you invest in a company, your money is pooled with everyone else's to run the company. The company also has a pool of profit, which is often split proportionally for dividends. You can also get a return by selling your stake in the company to someone else who wants to be involved. At no point are investments used to pay out returns to earlier shareholders.
Bitcoin as a whole fits the Ponzi scheme pattern, because at the exchanges the money used to pay off the early miners comes directly from people now buying coins. Since the Bitcoin market is so much smaller than the price of the Bitcoin supply, the main mechanism that external value comes into the Bitcoin economy is by investors trying to get into the scheme for its high (not-guaranteed) returns.
The only real distinction between a Ponzi scheme and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin has no single master, that we know of. Ponzi schemes usually have a single person or small group promoting the investment. Bitcoin doesn't have any organized leadership, but rather relies on the self-sustaining marketing buzz of zealots. That makes it a better fit for an economic bubble, rather than an actual Ponzi scheme.
Isn't this all public record, anyway? It sounds like the Navy wants to know if they'll be helping anyone escape justice by moving ships around.
The teacher in question could be in his early 70s. That's not unheard of, if he's in good health. That would mean he was an infant in the 1940's, and his mother could have left him in the care of sympathetic friends before the Nazis took her away. I'm told it was fairly common for Jews in Europe to make such arrangements as the Nazi threat moved closer.
My thoughts exactly. The picture itself has no context, and the article is the usual InfoWars style with lots of supposedly-self-evident cherry-picked anecdotes and no logic*. I'm going to assume that the problem in the picture is actually demonstrating an aspect of the transitive property. The intended solution is the realization that "15 - 5 - 2 = 15 - 7", or to state it as an abstract concept, "numbers represent quantities that may be separated and redistributed". Of course, parents whose education was all rote memorization don't understand the questions, so they're unable to help effectively, and in some cases can undermine the lesson entirely be asserting that the textbook is obviously wrong.
* I'm curious; is there an actual name for this style of presentation? I've seen it often in conspiracy theories, where a series of images, statements, and facts are presented without context to outrage the audience, then the author's theory is presented as the only context where everything makes sense, rather than allowing for each item's individual context to be understood first. It's common enough that I feel there must be some literary term for it, but I don't recall any.
What the hell does coloring a picture of a clock teach a second grader exactly?
The layout and parts of a clock face, and familiarity with the object. It's the first phase in learning any technology: understanding that it is not magic. The clock isn't a magical disk that telepathically communicates time to adults' heads, or just a moving wall decoration that's been there since before the kid was born. It is a mechanism for a purpose, and a thing of importance to be studied.
Consider similar exercises for other subjects. The first exercise in many programming languages is "Hello, World!", for the purpose of showing a minimal program that doesn't use any special features of the language.
Once exposed to a concept, the additional time spent coloring or reviewing strengthens the connections to related concepts. When coloring the minute hand, the student remembers that each number the minute hand passes represents five minutes. The Hollywood idea of rapid learning doesn't work too well in reality. Repetition and reinforcement are the keys to learning something and retaining it beyond the end of the school year.
I'm just saying there's no need to feel sorry for Fluke, either. They chose to give away the multimeters and play the hero.
SparkFun is in the business of selling DIY electronics. They're more like a modern Heath.
They're out the original shipment, but Fluke stepped in with an absolutely unnecessary act of goodwill. Now SparkFun's broken even, because they still have multimeters to sell to make their business, and the customers that would have bought the original ones still want multimeters, and now SparkFun has the Fluke brand, to boot...
But this is no longer in the hands of the inventory people. This is marketing. Sure, SparkFun could probably sell the multimeters at a very nice profit, but that's not their business. They're selling electronics in general, so they thrive on the repeat business rather than one-time equipment sales. Giving away these multimeters to loyal customers is a nice way to build their own brand loyalty.
Fluke looks like the good guy. SparkFun gets cheap viral marketing. Everybody's walking away happy.
I think that's a pretty sweet deal for Sparcfun. They violated a trademark and they're not suffering one bit from it. The company whose trademark they infringed is the one losing money.
...but Fluke apparently considers it worth the cost to be the good guy.
Not at all. They're the champions of Democrats-are-wrong, and since a Democrat administration isn't spending money on NASA, that must be wrong.
Never one to assume malice, my guess is that it was a temporary wallet used for short-term transfer of funds. Back when I worked in finance, we fairly often set up accounts for a few days, just to receive an incoming transfer or to send out funds from the right name. Those accounts, by their published nature, became targets for attack. It was always enlightening when a client sent in an emailed request to withdraw money from the temporary account, after we'd just closed the account as planned a few days before.
Similarly, I'm thinking the wallet was opened, used, then emptied, but stuck around on their servers. It'd make a convenient place to hide stolen coins (regardless of who stole them). Those malleable transactions could be used to skim coins and push them into the wallet. If noticed, any investigation into the wallet would reveal that it was just an internal account, conducting low-volume business as usual. The thieves could then transfer the coins out at their leisure, in small similarly-innocuous amounts.
Then everything collapses, and the company faces bankruptcy. Step one is to look at every asset the company has, and figure out whatever value it may have. Naturally, that would include explicitly checking each wallet, rather than just relying on what the database says the balance is. Lo and behold, one wallet has coins still in it, and the company might have assets to cover its debts, which is exactly why that search is the first step.
Consider that to be an engineer requires 4 years of 'work' during high school (unpaid). 5 years of college (also unpaid and requiring taking on debt). 2-3 years work experience. That's probably an investment of 15000-25000 hours. An investment worth 3/4 to a 1.25 million dollars. Certainly a 5-10% return on investment is very reasonable right? Well that's 50-100k per year.
Checking the math...
Let's assume 50 40-hour productive work weeks each year. High-school work isn't as good as college, which isn't as good as professional work, so we'll assume wages of $10, $20, and $30, respectively.
High school is 4 years * 50 weeks/year * 40 hours/week * 10 dollars/hour. That's $80,000. College is 5 years (assuming a 1-year master program) * 50 weeks/year * 40 hours/week * 20 dollars/hour. That's $200,000. A fresh graduate therefore has invested $280,000 in time with no return. Then they enter the workforce, and start getting the return.
The entry-level position is 3 years * 50 weeks/year * 40 hours/week * 30 dollars/hour. That's $180,000, but the subject is actually being paid for their time, now. Rather than adding that to the investment cost, that's the first three years of returns. We'll extrapolate that out for further insight.
After a total of five years in the workforce, even without any raises, the investment is fully reimbursed, and any additional returns are profit (reaching 7% ROI in ten years). In contrast, the employee could have simply dropped out of high school, and worked at $10 the whole time. That comes out to $20,000 per year, compared to the college track now earning $60,000 per year, so there's a profit of $40,000 per year for a college education.
With the initial investment cost of $280,000, the time investment in college is recouped in 7 years. Add a $40,000 investment cost for tuition and other expenses, and the investment is recouped in 8 years, still assuming a constant $60,000 income.
Of course, then there's taxes. Interestingly, since taxes aren't being paid during schooling, that actually lowers the relative value of the time being invested. Rather than an education costing $280,000 in lost income, it only costs $168,000 in post-tax lost income, assuming a 40% flat tax. Even with the lower take-home pay rate, that cost is recovered in only six years, and after ten years the ROI is 11%.
Your estimate of $50k to $100k to get a 5% to 10% ROI is close, but extreme. The low end of the salary range puts you in the high end of the return. However, the estimate of $750,000 for an education doesn't seem to make sense. Perhaps that's why a 6-figure salary for every employee seems unreasonable to the political and management folks - they've already done the math.
Of course, math is only a part of the issue. The costs and profits involved here are assuming that $10/hour is an acceptable baseline for wages. We've assumed that without a high school education, a baseline employee could sustain a $20,000 annual income, but we have not considered whether this is a suitable income for an acceptable standard of living in the modern age. That, however, is a discussion for another time.
Yet, whenever someone talks about raising H-1B limits, there's the inevitable concern about how the flood of cheap labor will drive down salaries. The other perspective is that STEM salaries are already overinflated, and bringing in foreigners will keep labor costs at reasonable rates.
Steady salaries just indicate that any disparity between labor supply and demand is also remaining steady.
The world of PHP.
Your grasp of sarcasm is incredible.
Fine. s/magic quotes/mysql_real_escape_string()/g... or if you prefer, preg_replace('/magic quotes/g', 'mysql_real_escape_string()', $post);
That's deprecated too, but I'd bet there's still folks out there clinging desperately to it and using it daily in production code.
Also, you should consider that I don't keep track of PHP's changes, because they'd have to change most of the language for it to be salvageable. I'm not trolling with outdated FUD; I'm arguing with one almost-outdated fact. It's almost outdated because PHP 5.3.8 is still distributed.
I'm pretty sure that's Perl. You can define something first as a scalar, then refer to it as an array, because HA HA I WAS JUST KIDDING!
You can also take a single variable and make it behave entirely differently depending on context. As a scalar, it works fine, but if you try to refer to it as an array, rm -rf /.
Not saying you'd want to do those things, but you can.
In fact, most PHP files are already valid Hack files.
No, no, no, and no.
The single biggest problem with PHP is the tendency for old code and old programmers to keep their bad habits around when moving to new projects. PHP lacked vital modern features (like static typing and namespaces) for so long, and it's evolved so many workarounds (like magic quotes), that programmers have learned the wrong way to accomplish basic tasks. Now they have a new language, supporting the right way to do these things... but the old and broken ways still work. Sure, there will be a few programmers that will use the new way and be thrilled about the good technique, but then time crunches will set in, and code reviews will be rushed (or nonexistent), and those old ways will creep in, bringing the bugs with them.
Backwards-compatibility with a broken language is a great way to improve a new language's adoption, and a terrible way to build a new language's reputation.
Sorry, officer... I didn't know it was illegal to murder people. No, I don't watch TV or read much, why do you ask? Look, I've had an IQ test and I was above average, so if you can't make a law clear enough that I'd know it, the law is wrong, and I must be innocent.
Oh, you want to judge based on common sense? Whose opinion are we going to use for that? Mine, or that enraged mob you've brought over there?
The only way you could have stopped them was to gu[a]rantee that you would retaliate
...or use diplomacy to convince the madman that it's really not in his best interest to launch them, but that's never been a popular option here on Slashdot.
The missiles are in the air. How do you stop them?
Talk nicely to the madman, and question whether such a measurement is really important enough to kill thousands, if not millions, of innocent people. Perhaps the madman will stop the attack on his own. Perhaps other madmen will see the insanity of such massive death over such trivial disputes, and reconsider their own nuclear warfare plans. In short, keep playing on the moral high ground.
Meanwhile, launch every kind of interception technology you have against the missiles. There have been successes in this area, with varying degrees of efficacy and danger. In the best case, you stop the attack and maintain both population and the moral high ground that brings allies in the imminent war. In the worst case, you're just as dead as you were without interception, but you still have those allies who can share the righteous outrage that someone would dare nuke someone who didn't even fire back, and since much of the US arsenal is either protected from attack or spread across wide areas of otherwise-uninteresting landscape, most of it will still be ready for use by the valiant defender who really didn't want to fight, but now must.
What was so scary about the Cold War was that talking wasn't a viable option. If someone got too offended, it was the end. The standing orders were that if a missile was detected, a retaliation would launch. There would be no confirmation and no superior reviewing orders. We came incredibly close to an all-out nuclear war on multiple occasions, each time saved by someone refusing to return fire against what were ultimately found to be false alarms. We now call these folks "heroes", not "pushovers".
There are those, myself included, that would consider talking to be a strength.
Right up to getting vaporized, there are several alternative options for stopping nukes that don't involve vaporizing even more innocent civilians. Talking our way out is one of the least hazardous and least expensive methods, and it has the added benefit of being done in parallel with other methods like interception and diversion.