The downside is that they're tying it to DNS, which is totally wrong. user1@example.com and user2@example.com are different identities. example.com can't, and shouldn't, be able to attest that something was said by user1.
At most, example.com ought to be able to attest that an email came through their server. That's something, I'll admit, but decades behind the state of the art.
Sign your emails. The tech has been out there for two decades. Decades, and that's real world time, not "internet time."
Everybody sign your emails, so that email from fuck-knows-who sticks out like a sore thumb. This would strike a great blow to phishing, and spam in general.
And best of all, people don't need new software for it. You don't need a new standard because there are already two competing standards (PGP vs S/MIME) -- why add a third? Just start using what you've already got.
You can't resell something that cannot be adequately protected through DRM, period
Uh oh, a lot of antique shops and used car dealers are in for a big surprise.;-)
(Let's assume you meant your comment specifically within the context of copyrighted content.) Are you saying used bookstores and used CDs stores don't work?
Beyond that, I wonder what "adequately protected through DRM" means. Has anything ever been adequately protected through DRM, or is this a purely hypothetical discussion?
How is increasing the number of workers supposed to decrease the unemployment rate?
It's not. The purpose of increasing the number of workers would be to build a larger/stronger industry (and the client industries which use it), and (presumably, which I guess is the government's whole justification for being involved in this) an associated larger tax base.
Before I upgraded to the C64 and became more of an asshole with my-computer-is-better-than-yours flamewars with the Apple IIe and Atari 800 dudes, I had a VIC-20. Even at the time, I knew how bad the Vic was, and there was no one I could snobbishly look down upon, like the douchebag antagonist of any of a dozen early 1980s movies. No one I could look down upon, that is, except the poor TS-1000 / ZX-81 guys.
"You're running out of memory, so your display is starting to get smaller?"
"Nice keyboard you've got there! Ha ha ha ha!"
Good grief, what a piece of shit that machine was. Check this out:
"I adore my sixty four"
"I grapple my Apple"
"I am sorry for my Atari"
"I am sick of my Vic"
"I ICBM my IBM"
"I.. uh.. I.. uh.. something something my Tee Ess One Thousand"
That junk of junk couldn't even rhyme!
I'll say this, though: you people got that piece of shit to do what you want, are heroes. I later took a perverse pride in having stretched the capabilities in my 5K (3.5K available to BASIC) Vic, but that's nothin' like the constraints a TS-1000 programmer worked in. You had to be real bad ass to even try, and badder-ass to not give up in despair. TS-1000 programmers rule. I am not worthy to lick your boots.
I think adding this to copyright law, for distinguishing between derived and not-derived works, would eliminate "clean room" reverse engineering as a defense.
Reverse Engineering's intent always is to produce something that copies another work's "qualitative" and "specific processing" and "compositional idea", and to do it while avoiding having to license the original. The causal link always exists, and the reproduction of behavior/interface always exists (and behavior and interface are the qualitiative expression -- the composition -- of software, or at least proprietary software). These things are the whole point of reverse engineering.
The clean room process is to guarantee that these aspects of the original are the only things that will be copied, but if these things alone are enough to make something be a derived work, then clean rooms are no defense. Indeed, there can't ever be any defense; all reverse engineering will be be copyright infringement. How could it not be?
There are so many ways to service SMB requests, Samba just happens to do it qualitatively the same as Windows? Linux' NFS server just happens to do it qualitatively the same as Sun's?
The weird thing about OTP (keys as large as the data itself) is that the Fifth Amendment really would unambiguously apply and not be controversial. If the purpose of the 5th is to keep innocent tortured people from making up confessions to please their tormentors, then they would make up OTP keys to produce whatever plaintext was desired. Any person accused of any crime could (with sufficient coercion) be "shown" to be guilty.
And similarly, actually-guilty accused people could make up OTP keys providing fake evidence which shows no wrongdoing.
OTP really solves the problem..
..but of course, creates its own problems. If you can memorize a terabyte key, then you don't need to own a block device upon which to store ciphertext.
What is needed is a truly magical cryptosystem, where one unit of ciphertext can be decrypted with two different reasonably short keys to produce two different plaintexts of equal length to the ciphertext. I hope someone invents it, because privacy issues aside, I think it would have great applications in data compression.;-)
When you create an encrypted volume, you should enter 2 keys, not just one. One will unlock your drive, another will appear to unlock your drive, but in fact deletes the contents of the disk entirely.
How do you persuade all attackers to run the code that deletes the contents? If you can make them run software of your choosing, then you probably also have the power to make them not want to peek at your data in the first place. Reminds me of a ST:TNG episode where someone's solution to a problem is "just change the gravitational constant of the universe."
It would, however, prevent you from using any sort of cloud hosting if you want to keep your data private. Because in order to be SOPA compliant, a cloud would have to scan your data to ensure that you didn't have any sort of "illicit" files.
I think majority opinion in the Google streetview wifi collection, was that broadcast isn't broadcast, if it involves computers. Some wifi operators were broadcasting plaintext secrets to the public, and yet, most people felt that it should be prohibited for anyone to pay attention to, or record, that information.
Whoever complained about the ssid should be charged under the local stalking laws. Peeping Toms, quit looking at other people's access points!!
More question mark abuse, I see. Mod submitter overrated. Or maybe Garrett got confused about what he was talking about.
There are three(!) totally seperate issues here, all being conflated as though they were the same thing:
How to build a "secure" system, where secure is defined in terms of preventing things from happen that the user doesn't want, and in this case we're concentrating on situations where the user isn't mysterious code with kernel mode.
How to conform to the UEFI secure boot spec, so that you can run whatever the hell you want on your UEFI computer.
Contractual obligations that Microsoft is imposing on manufacturers who want Microsoft logos on their products.
Many people are flaming Microsoft here. Fine. Fuck Microsoft. Now, that aside...
When Garrett starts saying things like "Signing the kernel isn't enough. Signed Linux kernels must refuse to load any unsigned kernel modules," he isn't talking about Microsoft or UEFI specs. He's talking about actual security -- how he thinks Linux ought to work, in order to protect users from running unknown kernel-mode code. He's not talking about Secure Boot (TM), he's talking about secure boot^H^H^H^H operation. Once your kernel has booted, UEFI specs are irrelevant, because you're not interacting with UEFI anymore and control of the machine is in the hands of the kernel, to protect or lose.
Once you've got your kernel signed and UEFI trusts the signer and it boots, you have solved the big UEFI interoperability problem that everyone is complaining about, and the kernel loading unsigned drivers doesn't change that a bit. At that point, you've got your machine working, and Linux is "secure boot compatible."
Refusing to load unsigned drivers is a way to take advantage of what UEFI secure boot ostensibly intends to offer users, as opposed to sacrificing the security which Secure Boot may offer by treating it merely as a compatibility obstacle.
BTW, I hope this whole signed kernel module issue makes people think back to Torvalds-vs-Tanenbaum. We all know who won, but are you still sure who was right?
That it's Congress' right to set the timing to whatever, was pretty much settled by Eldred, but this takes it to new degree. In Eldred we learned that Congress can change the expiration date after the work is already published; today we learn Congress can change the expiration date after that date has already arrived. The issues of fairness and the sanity of time-travel really are off the table as far as the Constitution / SCOTUS is concerned, so if you don't like it, then you have to persuade Congress.
That's interesting, because the last time copyright durations were extended, I always assumed that even if we corrected this corruption, the correction wouldn't be retroactive. Something with a 90-year countdown going, would remain counting down from 90, even if copyright durations got amended to 14 years or something like that.
But SCOTUS is saying it doesn't have to be that way. If Congress can take works that are currently public domain and make them copyrighted, then Congress can take works that still have 76 years of copyright and say they're now public domain.
Congress can really do pretty much anything it wants with copyright, short of literally using the word "unlimited" in durations (since that word's antonym is in the constitutional clause that gives them the right). Should the people ever start voting for a Congress that will reform things, that Congress will have the legal power to give people what they want.
In an unrealistic extreme example, if you (and by you, I mean everyone) vote for 14 years copyright this year, Congress can pass it in January and all works published prior to 1999 could instantly become public domain. Not that it would happen, but if it did, SCOTUS would support it.
That's why this is a particularly good time (right now, not November) to strike back at the people who are most responsible for it, rather than just the bills. It'll only be about one third as effective in the Senate, but for the House, every one of them needs to lose their party's nomination and not be on the ballots in November (unless they want to run as independents). This is something Democrats and Republicans can work together on, as such a cleanup would effect both of them about equally and doesn't really have any sort of partisan ideological component.
If we establish a rule that pushing this kind of nonsense can only be done by sacrificing the next election, it'll help a lot. And eventually the revolving list of supporters will all be junior reps without important committee positions to make it happen. SOPA only got as far as it did, because its top dog has so much seniority (since 1987!!?! WTF is wrong with you, TX-21?).
If you read what was written idealistically and at face value, the president is advocating the repeat of DMCA's circumvention prohibitions.
Not that I really think the president holds that position, but all that stuff about not inhibiting innovation, "prevent[ing] overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation," etc all points to repealing that law.
Consider the price of the Raspberry Pi, a $25 board by a small-time maker (totally not in the same economy-of-scale league as Samsung, LG, etc), which should be able to do pretty much everything we're talking about. And consider the latest generation of media player boxes (e.g. WDTV Live, etc) which retail for under $90 (an end-user product, not a building block for hackers) and include an enclosure, power supply, useless cable, redundant remote-- all stuff you wouldn't need if the computer were built into the monitor.
This stuff isn't expensive. By all means, debate whether it's a good idea or not! But let's throw around some more realistic dollar amounts. I think we're talking about an approximate $20 increase in hardware cost, and when you're buying a $1500 50" TV I think that's nearly (not completely, but close to) insignificant.
If we were talking about adding a $20 computer your toaster or coffeemaker, everyone would say it's cool, and the people who bring up practical concerns would be put down as anti-nerd party poopers.
All those concerns aside, the market voted on this when the iMac came out (well, the idea had been around earlier, in the form of all "portable" PCs). The votes added up to Yes.
So you've gotta remember: you're listing reasons to not buy one of these things, but none of them are reasons to not make or sell these things, because It Is Known that millions of people are going to ignore the reasons to not buy.
There were beefier computers (who didn't want a Lisa?) and cheaper computers (who did want a TS-1000?), but especially in 1983 as the price fell from around $600 to under $200, it got into the sweet spot. That got the machines into people's hands, and the best computer is the one you have.
I hate to see it, but the Repuplican party is becoming more and more polarized, and that's not good for the country as a whole.
Polarizing the big parties is one of the best things that can happen to the country as a whole. The Republican party has the same problem as the Democrat party, in being a catch-all for so many different (and incompatible!) ideas that it's not a real political party at all. The whole point of the primary system is to eliminate candidates, which results in the names that are on the ballots by election day, almost always being some of the worst choices. That hurts democracy.
Further polarization (and we need it to happen within Democrats too, where the fuck at the "Greens"? (not that I ever understood them)) could lead to mainstream acceptance of having more than two parties. That can only help.
The main sad thing is that it's happening at the federal level; I don't hear about party incohesiveness at my state level (at least not enough to make a difference), yet that's where election law is made (i.e. the stuff that keeps us stuck with two parties). We need this schisming to be happening, but need it worse at our local levels first, so that we can get the election reform to support political diversity and polarization in the bigger elections.
The polarization in the Republican party is a good thing, but nevertheless they will nominate single candidates for each position, and after that, it will all be gone for another 2-4 years.
Think about why and how people link to browsers. The thing about MSIE is that everyone who is able to use it, already has it preloaded. You'd expect there to be few links to it. Opera is almost the opposite; almost nobody gets Opera without downloading it from a web page. Firefox is somewhere in between; some people get it by going to a page and downloading it, and some people have it preloaded with their distro or get it through a package manager.
Thus, Opera will have lots of links to it, because following a link is how you get Opera. Also, Opera users tend to be bubblingly happy with it, and advocate (and linking is a way to advocate). Firefox has some, and with MSIE you'd expect to have few.
If I were naively writing a search engine that associates URLs with linking or otherwise related keywords, I bet the first release of my search engine would rank Opera's page as highly relevant to that term, too, and MSIE's page less so.
Each PHP release is better than the one before it, and it's getting close to being much like a "normal" language.
Close. It's not there yet, and probably never will be, due to compatibility requirements.
You can pretty much do anything in PHP you want, but the bigger your project gets, the more you're going to run into its weirdnesses. I don't have a list to enumerate for you, but please believe me, I run into "Holy shit, I don't believe this" language oddities every couple months, where PHP does something just plain weird and wrong compared everything else. After nearly 5 years maintaining some PHP code, I still get surprised once in a while.
Another thing to look out for is that PHP versions deployed on various web providers vary, so when someone says PHP 5.3 fixed something that had been totally fucked-up-beyond-belief in the language before that, they might be right, but are you sure you're going to be using 5.3?
Just look at the release notes to get some idea how bad things have been. I'm not saying that's a fair way to judge the state of the language as of the latest release, but when you see quotations from the past (as recently a just 2 years ago) about how great PHP is, and realize just how horrible PHP definitely was at the time the person said that, you'll realize that most PHP recommendations need to be taken with a shovelful of skepticism.
That said, if you inherit and have to maintain a PHP project, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Your brain will eventually get used to all the damn dollar signs in the variable names, you will be able to get your job done. I've never been in a position where I could say "It's not my fault, PHP just can't do it" because it always can. There's always a way around PHP's problems and it has never stopped me from accomplishing a goal, but you are going to occasionally be expending more effort than programmers who use normal languages.
Don't spread it. Don't start new projects in PHP, both for your own sake in case the project grows, and for the sake of whoever comes after you. There are plenty of not-broken languages out there.
What a bizarre thing to say. A blackout of a handful of websites, especially when self-imposed, is hardly "blocking the internet." It's not in the same league as the government fucking up DNS for everyone whether they consent or not.
how do we protect unsuspecting users from QR codes, where you can't see the destination at all?
By having clicking links never be dangerous or risky.
I don't know about you, but when I load a web page, I expect my browser to display a web page, not download and execute foreign code, nor run that code as with my permissions.
The old advice of "don't click a link if you don't know where it goes" was stupid. Not stupid in the sense that it shouldn't be heeded, but that it was an acknowledgement that peoples' browsers were totally broken and the advice should have been withdrawn a week later after people got the hole fixed. Of course the joke is that the holes don't ever get fixed.
What really sucks is that QR codes are primarily used by mobile users, and they tend to run recent browsers rather than legacy shit. (Seriously, mobile Safari and the Android equivalent are pretty damn good browsers and perversely better than what most people use on their desktops.) Their browsers really ought to not be so broken that loading a page could be risky. Apparently that's not the case? *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
The downside is that they're tying it to DNS, which is totally wrong. user1@example.com and user2@example.com are different identities. example.com can't, and shouldn't, be able to attest that something was said by user1.
At most, example.com ought to be able to attest that an email came through their server. That's something, I'll admit, but decades behind the state of the art.
Sign your emails. The tech has been out there for two decades. Decades, and that's real world time, not "internet time."
Everybody sign your emails, so that email from fuck-knows-who sticks out like a sore thumb. This would strike a great blow to phishing, and spam in general.
And best of all, people don't need new software for it. You don't need a new standard because there are already two competing standards (PGP vs S/MIME) -- why add a third? Just start using what you've already got.
Uh oh, a lot of antique shops and used car dealers are in for a big surprise. ;-)
(Let's assume you meant your comment specifically within the context of copyrighted content.) Are you saying used bookstores and used CDs stores don't work?
Beyond that, I wonder what "adequately protected through DRM" means. Has anything ever been adequately protected through DRM, or is this a purely hypothetical discussion?
It's not. The purpose of increasing the number of workers would be to build a larger/stronger industry (and the client industries which use it), and (presumably, which I guess is the government's whole justification for being involved in this) an associated larger tax base.
Kidnap rescuing, maybe?
Before I upgraded to the C64 and became more of an asshole with my-computer-is-better-than-yours flamewars with the Apple IIe and Atari 800 dudes, I had a VIC-20. Even at the time, I knew how bad the Vic was, and there was no one I could snobbishly look down upon, like the douchebag antagonist of any of a dozen early 1980s movies. No one I could look down upon, that is, except the poor TS-1000 / ZX-81 guys.
"You're running out of memory, so your display is starting to get smaller?"
"Nice keyboard you've got there! Ha ha ha ha!"
Good grief, what a piece of shit that machine was. Check this out:
That junk of junk couldn't even rhyme!
I'll say this, though: you people got that piece of shit to do what you want, are heroes. I later took a perverse pride in having stretched the capabilities in my 5K (3.5K available to BASIC) Vic, but that's nothin' like the constraints a TS-1000 programmer worked in. You had to be real bad ass to even try, and badder-ass to not give up in despair. TS-1000 programmers rule. I am not worthy to lick your boots.
I think adding this to copyright law, for distinguishing between derived and not-derived works, would eliminate "clean room" reverse engineering as a defense.
Reverse Engineering's intent always is to produce something that copies another work's "qualitative" and "specific processing" and "compositional idea", and to do it while avoiding having to license the original. The causal link always exists, and the reproduction of behavior/interface always exists (and behavior and interface are the qualitiative expression -- the composition -- of software, or at least proprietary software). These things are the whole point of reverse engineering.
The clean room process is to guarantee that these aspects of the original are the only things that will be copied, but if these things alone are enough to make something be a derived work, then clean rooms are no defense. Indeed, there can't ever be any defense; all reverse engineering will be be copyright infringement. How could it not be?
There are so many ways to service SMB requests, Samba just happens to do it qualitatively the same as Windows? Linux' NFS server just happens to do it qualitatively the same as Sun's?
The weird thing about OTP (keys as large as the data itself) is that the Fifth Amendment really would unambiguously apply and not be controversial. If the purpose of the 5th is to keep innocent tortured people from making up confessions to please their tormentors, then they would make up OTP keys to produce whatever plaintext was desired. Any person accused of any crime could (with sufficient coercion) be "shown" to be guilty.
And similarly, actually-guilty accused people could make up OTP keys providing fake evidence which shows no wrongdoing.
OTP really solves the problem..
What is needed is a truly magical cryptosystem, where one unit of ciphertext can be decrypted with two different reasonably short keys to produce two different plaintexts of equal length to the ciphertext. I hope someone invents it, because privacy issues aside, I think it would have great applications in data compression. ;-)
How do you persuade all attackers to run the code that deletes the contents? If you can make them run software of your choosing, then you probably also have the power to make them not want to peek at your data in the first place. Reminds me of a ST:TNG episode where someone's solution to a problem is "just change the gravitational constant of the universe."
Let them scan ciphertext. Everybody wins.
I think majority opinion in the Google streetview wifi collection, was that broadcast isn't broadcast, if it involves computers. Some wifi operators were broadcasting plaintext secrets to the public, and yet, most people felt that it should be prohibited for anyone to pay attention to, or record, that information.
Whoever complained about the ssid should be charged under the local stalking laws. Peeping Toms, quit looking at other people's access points!!
More question mark abuse, I see. Mod submitter overrated. Or maybe Garrett got confused about what he was talking about.
There are three(!) totally seperate issues here, all being conflated as though they were the same thing:
Many people are flaming Microsoft here. Fine. Fuck Microsoft. Now, that aside...
When Garrett starts saying things like "Signing the kernel isn't enough. Signed Linux kernels must refuse to load any unsigned kernel modules," he isn't talking about Microsoft or UEFI specs. He's talking about actual security -- how he thinks Linux ought to work, in order to protect users from running unknown kernel-mode code. He's not talking about Secure Boot (TM), he's talking about secure boot^H^H^H^H operation. Once your kernel has booted, UEFI specs are irrelevant, because you're not interacting with UEFI anymore and control of the machine is in the hands of the kernel, to protect or lose.
Once you've got your kernel signed and UEFI trusts the signer and it boots, you have solved the big UEFI interoperability problem that everyone is complaining about, and the kernel loading unsigned drivers doesn't change that a bit. At that point, you've got your machine working, and Linux is "secure boot compatible."
Refusing to load unsigned drivers is a way to take advantage of what UEFI secure boot ostensibly intends to offer users, as opposed to sacrificing the security which Secure Boot may offer by treating it merely as a compatibility obstacle.
BTW, I hope this whole signed kernel module issue makes people think back to Torvalds-vs-Tanenbaum. We all know who won, but are you still sure who was right?
(I must be in an optimistic mood this week.)
That it's Congress' right to set the timing to whatever, was pretty much settled by Eldred, but this takes it to new degree. In Eldred we learned that Congress can change the expiration date after the work is already published; today we learn Congress can change the expiration date after that date has already arrived. The issues of fairness and the sanity of time-travel really are off the table as far as the Constitution / SCOTUS is concerned, so if you don't like it, then you have to persuade Congress.
That's interesting, because the last time copyright durations were extended, I always assumed that even if we corrected this corruption, the correction wouldn't be retroactive. Something with a 90-year countdown going, would remain counting down from 90, even if copyright durations got amended to 14 years or something like that.
But SCOTUS is saying it doesn't have to be that way. If Congress can take works that are currently public domain and make them copyrighted, then Congress can take works that still have 76 years of copyright and say they're now public domain.
Congress can really do pretty much anything it wants with copyright, short of literally using the word "unlimited" in durations (since that word's antonym is in the constitutional clause that gives them the right). Should the people ever start voting for a Congress that will reform things, that Congress will have the legal power to give people what they want.
In an unrealistic extreme example, if you (and by you, I mean everyone) vote for 14 years copyright this year, Congress can pass it in January and all works published prior to 1999 could instantly become public domain. Not that it would happen, but if it did, SCOTUS would support it.
That's why this is a particularly good time (right now, not November) to strike back at the people who are most responsible for it, rather than just the bills. It'll only be about one third as effective in the Senate, but for the House, every one of them needs to lose their party's nomination and not be on the ballots in November (unless they want to run as independents). This is something Democrats and Republicans can work together on, as such a cleanup would effect both of them about equally and doesn't really have any sort of partisan ideological component.
If we establish a rule that pushing this kind of nonsense can only be done by sacrificing the next election, it'll help a lot. And eventually the revolving list of supporters will all be junior reps without important committee positions to make it happen. SOPA only got as far as it did, because its top dog has so much seniority (since 1987!!?! WTF is wrong with you, TX-21?).
If you read what was written idealistically and at face value, the president is advocating the repeat of DMCA's circumvention prohibitions.
Not that I really think the president holds that position, but all that stuff about not inhibiting innovation, "prevent[ing] overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation," etc all points to repealing that law.
$200, really?
Consider the price of the Raspberry Pi, a $25 board by a small-time maker (totally not in the same economy-of-scale league as Samsung, LG, etc), which should be able to do pretty much everything we're talking about. And consider the latest generation of media player boxes (e.g. WDTV Live, etc) which retail for under $90 (an end-user product, not a building block for hackers) and include an enclosure, power supply, useless cable, redundant remote-- all stuff you wouldn't need if the computer were built into the monitor.
This stuff isn't expensive. By all means, debate whether it's a good idea or not! But let's throw around some more realistic dollar amounts. I think we're talking about an approximate $20 increase in hardware cost, and when you're buying a $1500 50" TV I think that's nearly (not completely, but close to) insignificant.
If we were talking about adding a $20 computer your toaster or coffeemaker, everyone would say it's cool, and the people who bring up practical concerns would be put down as anti-nerd party poopers.
All those concerns aside, the market voted on this when the iMac came out (well, the idea had been around earlier, in the form of all "portable" PCs). The votes added up to Yes.
So you've gotta remember: you're listing reasons to not buy one of these things, but none of them are reasons to not make or sell these things, because It Is Known that millions of people are going to ignore the reasons to not buy.
There were beefier computers (who didn't want a Lisa?) and cheaper computers (who did want a TS-1000?), but especially in 1983 as the price fell from around $600 to under $200, it got into the sweet spot. That got the machines into people's hands, and the best computer is the one you have.
Polarizing the big parties is one of the best things that can happen to the country as a whole. The Republican party has the same problem as the Democrat party, in being a catch-all for so many different (and incompatible!) ideas that it's not a real political party at all. The whole point of the primary system is to eliminate candidates, which results in the names that are on the ballots by election day, almost always being some of the worst choices. That hurts democracy.
Further polarization (and we need it to happen within Democrats too, where the fuck at the "Greens"? (not that I ever understood them)) could lead to mainstream acceptance of having more than two parties. That can only help.
The main sad thing is that it's happening at the federal level; I don't hear about party incohesiveness at my state level (at least not enough to make a difference), yet that's where election law is made (i.e. the stuff that keeps us stuck with two parties). We need this schisming to be happening, but need it worse at our local levels first, so that we can get the election reform to support political diversity and polarization in the bigger elections.
The polarization in the Republican party is a good thing, but nevertheless they will nominate single candidates for each position, and after that, it will all be gone for another 2-4 years.
In other words, "better you than me."
Think about why and how people link to browsers. The thing about MSIE is that everyone who is able to use it, already has it preloaded. You'd expect there to be few links to it. Opera is almost the opposite; almost nobody gets Opera without downloading it from a web page. Firefox is somewhere in between; some people get it by going to a page and downloading it, and some people have it preloaded with their distro or get it through a package manager.
Thus, Opera will have lots of links to it, because following a link is how you get Opera. Also, Opera users tend to be bubblingly happy with it, and advocate (and linking is a way to advocate). Firefox has some, and with MSIE you'd expect to have few.
If I were naively writing a search engine that associates URLs with linking or otherwise related keywords, I bet the first release of my search engine would rank Opera's page as highly relevant to that term, too, and MSIE's page less so.
Each PHP release is better than the one before it, and it's getting close to being much like a "normal" language.
Close. It's not there yet, and probably never will be, due to compatibility requirements.
You can pretty much do anything in PHP you want, but the bigger your project gets, the more you're going to run into its weirdnesses. I don't have a list to enumerate for you, but please believe me, I run into "Holy shit, I don't believe this" language oddities every couple months, where PHP does something just plain weird and wrong compared everything else. After nearly 5 years maintaining some PHP code, I still get surprised once in a while.
Another thing to look out for is that PHP versions deployed on various web providers vary, so when someone says PHP 5.3 fixed something that had been totally fucked-up-beyond-belief in the language before that, they might be right, but are you sure you're going to be using 5.3?
Just look at the release notes to get some idea how bad things have been. I'm not saying that's a fair way to judge the state of the language as of the latest release, but when you see quotations from the past (as recently a just 2 years ago) about how great PHP is, and realize just how horrible PHP definitely was at the time the person said that, you'll realize that most PHP recommendations need to be taken with a shovelful of skepticism.
That said, if you inherit and have to maintain a PHP project, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Your brain will eventually get used to all the damn dollar signs in the variable names, you will be able to get your job done. I've never been in a position where I could say "It's not my fault, PHP just can't do it" because it always can. There's always a way around PHP's problems and it has never stopped me from accomplishing a goal, but you are going to occasionally be expending more effort than programmers who use normal languages.
Don't spread it. Don't start new projects in PHP, both for your own sake in case the project grows, and for the sake of whoever comes after you. There are plenty of not-broken languages out there.
What a bizarre thing to say. A blackout of a handful of websites, especially when self-imposed, is hardly "blocking the internet." It's not in the same league as the government fucking up DNS for everyone whether they consent or not.
Death to SHE!
By having clicking links never be dangerous or risky.
I don't know about you, but when I load a web page, I expect my browser to display a web page, not download and execute foreign code, nor run that code as with my permissions.
The old advice of "don't click a link if you don't know where it goes" was stupid. Not stupid in the sense that it shouldn't be heeded, but that it was an acknowledgement that peoples' browsers were totally broken and the advice should have been withdrawn a week later after people got the hole fixed. Of course the joke is that the holes don't ever get fixed.
What really sucks is that QR codes are primarily used by mobile users, and they tend to run recent browsers rather than legacy shit. (Seriously, mobile Safari and the Android equivalent are pretty damn good browsers and perversely better than what most people use on their desktops.) Their browsers really ought to not be so broken that loading a page could be risky. Apparently that's not the case? *sigh*