It is hard to have your creativity crushed, correctly, for years and not let it stifle your drive to test the walls of the box. In today's world of mature sciences nobody could make a great leap without knowing a great deal that couldn't be leaped over and where their attempts to leap failed. The people who can do it will be rarer still than in the past and in a time and place to succeed in that leap even more rarely but it will still happen eventually.
I actually think that aside from the base knowledge needed complexity and everyone having thought of everything has nothing to do with it. Great leaps are always simple seeming after discovered and even simpler in the minds of the men who discover them.
Einstein was such a man in a world that appeared to be filled with mature science to those of the day. It all began with a mind who could visualize things others found vastly complex as simple abstractions. Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had.
Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it.
Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed. But they will come. Probably several in a fairly short period of time.
Mark my worlds most of the things we think are impossible today will be possible later. FTL travel? It won't be found by someone trying to travel FTL but by someone who doesn't see the universe in terms of space and travel at all. Twenty or even a hundred years later people will be amazed at how advanced they are, making progressive discoveries that stem from that man's simple perspective. Almost none of them will intuitive see things in that simple way though. They will be smarter men capable of harassing and riding all the complexity of utilizing the model without that simple understanding. Fundamental advancements require thinking in a fundamental way.
How about Tesla? I dare say we have more data and analysis of electricity and magnetism than he did. Probably a much more detailed and complex understanding of even Tesla's own inventions. In fact we tend to think we know all about it. Yet, I have no doubt that were the man alive today he would be doing things that are fundamental progressions of his intuitive mental model on these topics but revealed fundamental and groundbreaking new ideas to everyone else. He could probably explain the entire topic fully in three sentences and nobody would get it. They would just think he was simplifying great complexity for minds simpler than his own.
"Example: a kid says, in class, that they enjoy math. Some other kid kicks he shit out of them for being a nerd. Is the one who enjoys math stupid for acknowledging it, or can we say that the person who decided to kick their ass is wrong to have done so?"
Kicking the shit out of someone is harming them seeing someone naked is not. Analogy invalidated. Enjoying math carries no reasonable negative consequences. Giving out nude photos carries inevitable negative consequences.
Nothing you said logically parallels anything I said.
"Also, we are freely available to take nude pictures of ourselves without fear of their public display, unless we ourselves put them in the public arena."
That's ridiculous. We are freely able to take nude pictures of ourselves but if those pictures are given to someone else we absolutely have not just the fear but the reasonable expectation that person will use them how they wish including putting them in the public arena if they are so inclined. As soon as you give someone else the pics the public has a reasonable expectation that you are prepared to accept the consequences of their further distribution.
"Facebook is not the public arena"
You've got to be kidding me. You should NEVER EVER put anything on any social media site that you aren't comfortable giving to your employer. It is definitely publicly accessible.
"In this case, women took nude pictures (or videos, I guess) of themselves. Not illegal, and it's only naughty if you're a puritan"
No but it's stupid because everyone else pretends to be a puritan in public. So there are consequences to having those images and videos distributed. The videos and images eventually spreading around is an inevitable consequence of giving them to others in the first place. Thus the blame for the fallout isn't even shared by the person who spread them around it falls squarely on the shoulders of the stupid person who gave someone nude images/videos of themselves.
Blackmailing these girls didn't magically make him responsible for those consequences. He offered them a way to avoid facing them in exchange for voluntarily giving him something that didn't harm them in any way.
So if a guy steals a pack of gum at the store every time he goes and goes to the store twice a week for a couple years you'd contend he should get life if he ever gets caught stealing the gum?
Corrollary: Once you've committed a crime or crimes sufficient to get a 25 year sentence, you may as well keep going because the punishment isn't any worse.
See the problem? "
s/25 year/life/ this isn't a problem because it is already a problem under the existing system. Also requires a modification, it doesn't really matter what the potential is for the crimes you've committed only the crimes you've been caught committing. If you got away with committing a crime with a life sentence that isn't really a factor to motivate or demotivate you from committing the next crime (at least not in terms of racking up penalties).
There is a significant difference here. Raping someone is a physical assault and criminal in itself. Watching a girl voluntarily perform a striptease on a webcam is not. He didn't hold a gun to their heads, he didn't use a knife, he didn't physically overcome them or put them in a situation in which they could reasonably be said to have no choice. He simply gave them a voluntary way out of facing the consequences some poor choices they had made (choices that were legal and therefore gave him no obligation to report to authorities) before he ever came along. Even if the choice were sex and not simply looking the sex would have been consensual. These girls weren't forced.
There is one very big difference between the victims here and the victims of rape and robbery.
One has a reasonable right to assume that nothing they do entitles someone to rape or rob them. One has absolutely no reasonable right to think that nude images and videos they distribute to others won't eventually be leaked and even released publicly. Leaking or releasing the photos/videos might be a shitty thing to do but doesn't even begin to qualify as criminal on any level and the consequences are the fault lies with the one who gave out nude photos/videos not the one who leaked them.
This isn't some criminal act he was withholding information about from authorities in order to extort money. This is just a horny guy giving girls an option to get out of facing the consequences of their actions. The option he gave them might infringe on their sense of modesty but didn't actually hurt them in any way. It wouldn't make a difference to me if he asked them to have sex with him. It isn't like he is forcing them they could always just say no and face the consequences they brought on themselves.
"One can debate the wisdom of sending sexy pictures through email or private messages, but nobody considers it "public nudity"."
Yes but if one has sent said sexy pictures through email or private messages one has already assumed 100% of the responsibility for the consequences of those images being leaked or released. The boyfriend who shared isn't to blame the girlfriend who gave him the material to share needs to take personal responsibility.
This guy got the images they had already distributed and threatened to distribute them more widely. Again, had he done so the responsibility for the consequences is STILL is 100% with the girl who sent nude pictures of herself to others. Those pictures landing on the internet and going public is a predictable and likely consequence.
The only thing different here is that he gave them a chance to avoid the consequences of their actions in exchange for dropping their modesty and letting him see more images/video of them nude. It isn't like he held a gun to their head and forced them to do anything. They could have simply refused and faced the consequences of their bad judgement.
My understanding is that blackmail typically requires a threat of physical harm in exchange for either a financial gain for the blackmailer or financial loss for the blackmailed.
People use leverage to force us to do things we don't want to do all the time without it being blackmail. How many things you haven't wanted to do have you done under either the direct or implied threat of termination at work (write ups, accepting changes in benefits, etc)? Or the threat of prosecution (plea bargins, telling the truth on legal documents)?
Identity theft is using someone's identifying information to steal money. It is highly debatable whether it should be applied to anything else. The law certainly was never intended to be.
That would depend on the force and depend on what they are being forced to do. My wife forced me to put my plate in the dishwasher under threat of cutting my balls off in my sleep last night. My employer forced me to sign a revised employee handbook under threat of termination a few weeks ago. My internet provider made me agree to a contract under threat of refusal of service. My cell phone provider did the same.
People force us to do things we don't want to do under some sort of threat all the time. In this case the threat was to have them face potential consequences they accepted when making nude content and sending it out in the first place (thus providing material he could blackmail them with and those consequences remain their responsibility even if he had followed through) and the consequence was violating their sense of modesty and embarrassing them a bit more.
What he did was morally reprehensible and wrong. But was it criminal? If so, it was fine or probation level criminal not felony and pound me in the ass prison criminal.
Exactly. Some have pointed out repercussions of having nude photos publicly exposed but he didn't make them photograph themselves nude to begin with or make them send said photos and videos to someone else. They did that all on their own. There has to be some personal accountability there as well.
This isn't at all like playing blame the victim in a rape case or the like. In that scenario the victim should have a reasonable expectation that they won't be violently attacked and raped no matter what they do. In the case of a girl (especially an attractive one) giving out nude photos and videos the expectation should be that they WILL be leaked to some degree at some point. At some point you break up, you get divorced, someone finds them, or he brags to a buddy and shows them a glimpse. It is a completely predictable and avoidable outcome. The power is hers to predict and avoid it so the blame for the outcome hers not on the one who finds/leaks/views it.
"Give him probation and community service for privacy/womens rights or similar. Teach him a useful lesson instead of making him a hardened criminal."
Exactly.
" There have been multiple cases where people have lost their jobs, spouses, or visitation with children as a result of graphic/nude images being made public."
They had already made nude imagery and given it to others. That is how he blackmailed them. I don't want to blame the victim but at some point personal accountability does come in to play. All of those things could well have resulted from sharing the same nude pictures/videos with the people he was pretending to be.
"This person is being charged with blackmail and computer intrusion. Not embarrassing people."
True but he is being charged with blackmail and computer intrusion because he embarrassed people in a way that strikes the moral outrage nerve. He is also being charged with identity theft. Either we need to raise the bar for identity theft way beyond simply logging on to someone's facebook account or we need to drastically reduce the penalties. I log in to my wife's email and facebook accounts all the time and she mine. Does that make us guilty of identity theft?
In most cases business insurance does not allow companies to hire felons. Even if something completely unrelated came up that required a large payout the insurance company could discover the violation and refuse to pay out.
"Why? Then you just trivialize what he did and make it so other people can do this."
Because what he did was trivial. He tricked some girls into letting him see them naked. OMG. They are just bodies for god sake we all have them and they will all show them to hundreds of guys over the course of their life and regret many of those times. But but he LIED. Yes he lied and those same girls will no doubt have been lied to by every guy they sleep with to some degree or another. All men are willing to lie or withhold, or otherwise twist the truth to get laid.
What he did is morally reprehensible but hardly criminal. It makes him worthy of despising and calling a pig but then so would a more severe action like cheating on a girlfriend.
"a $500 fine for criminally using someone else's account? No way"
He didn't use someone's bank account. He used their social networking account in a way that results in absolutely no tangible damage to anyone. The bar for identity theft can't just be pretending to be someone else in a harmless prank and if that is going to be the bar then yes the punishments have to dropped to something appropriate for a harmless prank. What next? If he pretends to be a friend confirming his alibi to his girlfriend/wife on the phone so he can sleep around we charge him with identity theft and communications fraud?
"I'm sure some people find that kind of thing fun, but the simple fact is that the damage is greater than getting many STDs."
Not really. The only possible damage is a little embarrassment. We shouldn't be sending someone to prison over violating someone's sense of modesty and embarrassing them. There is an offense there but an action that does no more harm than potentially stirring up an emotion shouldn't result in effectively permanently destroying the life of the person doing it (which prison time does regardless of duration).
20 years doesn't seem relatively mild. Any actual prison time seems relatively severe. A prison sentence means never being employed in a real job again and likely physical assault and rape. Does offending a few people's sense of modesty really justify doing that to someone regardless of how many people he did it to?
Some sort of small fine seems appropriate here. Maybe $500 that should be enough to discourage most people from this type of behavior.
"No. The language was, possibly still is, a badly defined mess."
No, you just don't know Perl.
"It's fine to write while (<file1>), right? It's fine to write while (a && b), right?"
Yes to the first and no to the second. It would result in an error about bare words I believe. Anyone who ever wrote any Perl, and I'm talking a single afternoon farting around with online tutorial, would know that. At least it does if you use strict and warnings, I couldn't tell you what it does without because I always use strict and warnings. You do use strict and use warnings, right?
"But it's not fine to use two handles with a logical in a while test."
It is perfectly fine. It seems likely that you, in your ignorance, assumed that one of the filehandle lines would be automatically assigned to $_ when in reality you are using them for a comparison and throwing them away. Relying on $_ is bad form and leads to hard to read and understand code and things breaking in strange places. What you probably wanted was while(<FILEA> && defined(my $line = <FILEB>)) or maybe while(defined(my $linea = <FILEA>) && defined(my $lineb = <FILEB>)).
"Like placing parentheses around an expression doesn't alter its value"
Huh? Unless you mean for order of operations purposes where it certainly does have an impact in Perl you must just be nitpicking about syntax style. Just like you do when you complain about Perl making use of many symbols. There is no such thing as a correct syntax style provided it is functional and consistent which Perl's certainly is. You are asserting a pure aesthetic preference as if it were the way things should be (or shouldn't be in this case). You sound like a Pythonite.
There are no shortage of purpose built languages that were designed for a specific purpose. Javascript is a web language, PHP is a web language. These languages were designed for web content and that is what they are primarily used for. They can be used for other things but you are using a tool for something other than it's designed purpose.
Perl's intention is not a particular purpose at all but to work like real language in the sense that the meaning of elements within the language is context related and not static regardless of context.
"people are realizing that (a) web programming isn't rocket science and (b) most people need modifications of existing"
Doesn't have much relevance to Perl or whether Perl is suddenly going to die as Perl is not about web programming. That is only one of many many things that people have used Perl for. I think you'll find that most serious Perl programmers weren't really thrilled about dealing with hobbyist web programmers when it was the popular choice to fill this hole.
My anecdotal experience (developing on systems doing millions of matches against complex expressions in a huge bank of patterns daily) indicate that the disparity is going in Perl's favor over time. And you need an optimization for your specific work case you might just find it is already there. I was thinking about building essentially the exact same functionality when I found the perl "study" function for instance.
People think Perl is dead and static because it has been Perl 5 forever but Perl is anything but static. Perl 5 sees tons of development, not just bug fixes and optimizations but major functionality additions. I just updated my copy of the camel book which was two editions out of date. Both covered Perl 5 and it is just a new edition of the same book. But the book has tripled in size and most of the new features are only covered in light detail. Because Perl 6 has essentially been designed major functional improvements to the Perl 6 model are still just Perl 5 updates. For instance there has been a couple of major overhauls of perl threading all within Perl 5.
Perl is definitely still the right solution. Python is something made by people who don't know Perl and think they know what code should look like. So they made a language that offers no benefits over Perl and has enforced white space. If you already properly indent your code there is really nothing to be gained using Python and Python isn't as well suited as Perl to many tasks. Python doesn't have anything has comprehensive as CPAN... no other language does. There are CPAN like solutions out there but they aren't anywhere near as comprehensive.
First of all, a lack of braces makes code much more difficult to follow. That equates to ugly in my mind. The other thing people harp on are the magic variables in Perl. Seriously, there are only a half dozen in common usage. I think most of the people harping on Perl don't like that you need to know Perl to read Perl (or to write it correctly). It isn't a language that lends itself well to sitting down with a reference and applying your C knowledge. Well written Perl is certainly quite readable for a Perl programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
It is hard to have your creativity crushed, correctly, for years and not let it stifle your drive to test the walls of the box. In today's world of mature sciences nobody could make a great leap without knowing a great deal that couldn't be leaped over and where their attempts to leap failed. The people who can do it will be rarer still than in the past and in a time and place to succeed in that leap even more rarely but it will still happen eventually.
I actually think that aside from the base knowledge needed complexity and everyone having thought of everything has nothing to do with it. Great leaps are always simple seeming after discovered and even simpler in the minds of the men who discover them.
Einstein was such a man in a world that appeared to be filled with mature science to those of the day. It all began with a mind who could visualize things others found vastly complex as simple abstractions. Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had.
Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it.
Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed. But they will come. Probably several in a fairly short period of time.
Mark my worlds most of the things we think are impossible today will be possible later. FTL travel? It won't be found by someone trying to travel FTL but by someone who doesn't see the universe in terms of space and travel at all. Twenty or even a hundred years later people will be amazed at how advanced they are, making progressive discoveries that stem from that man's simple perspective. Almost none of them will intuitive see things in that simple way though. They will be smarter men capable of harassing and riding all the complexity of utilizing the model without that simple understanding. Fundamental advancements require thinking in a fundamental way.
How about Tesla? I dare say we have more data and analysis of electricity and magnetism than he did. Probably a much more detailed and complex understanding of even Tesla's own inventions. In fact we tend to think we know all about it. Yet, I have no doubt that were the man alive today he would be doing things that are fundamental progressions of his intuitive mental model on these topics but revealed fundamental and groundbreaking new ideas to everyone else. He could probably explain the entire topic fully in three sentences and nobody would get it. They would just think he was simplifying great complexity for minds simpler than his own.
"Example: a kid says, in class, that they enjoy math. Some other kid kicks he shit out of them for being a nerd. Is the one who enjoys math stupid for acknowledging it, or can we say that the person who decided to kick their ass is wrong to have done so?"
Kicking the shit out of someone is harming them seeing someone naked is not. Analogy invalidated. Enjoying math carries no reasonable negative consequences. Giving out nude photos carries inevitable negative consequences.
Nothing you said logically parallels anything I said.
"Also, we are freely available to take nude pictures of ourselves without fear of their public display, unless we ourselves put them in the public arena."
That's ridiculous. We are freely able to take nude pictures of ourselves but if those pictures are given to someone else we absolutely have not just the fear but the reasonable expectation that person will use them how they wish including putting them in the public arena if they are so inclined. As soon as you give someone else the pics the public has a reasonable expectation that you are prepared to accept the consequences of their further distribution.
"Facebook is not the public arena"
You've got to be kidding me. You should NEVER EVER put anything on any social media site that you aren't comfortable giving to your employer. It is definitely publicly accessible.
"In this case, women took nude pictures (or videos, I guess) of themselves. Not illegal, and it's only naughty if you're a puritan"
No but it's stupid because everyone else pretends to be a puritan in public. So there are consequences to having those images and videos distributed. The videos and images eventually spreading around is an inevitable consequence of giving them to others in the first place. Thus the blame for the fallout isn't even shared by the person who spread them around it falls squarely on the shoulders of the stupid person who gave someone nude images/videos of themselves.
Blackmailing these girls didn't magically make him responsible for those consequences. He offered them a way to avoid facing them in exchange for voluntarily giving him something that didn't harm them in any way.
So if a guy steals a pack of gum at the store every time he goes and goes to the store twice a week for a couple years you'd contend he should get life if he ever gets caught stealing the gum?
"
Corrollary: Once you've committed a crime or crimes sufficient to get a 25 year sentence, you may as well keep going because the punishment isn't any worse.
See the problem?
"
s/25 year/life/ this isn't a problem because it is already a problem under the existing system. Also requires a modification, it doesn't really matter what the potential is for the crimes you've committed only the crimes you've been caught committing. If you got away with committing a crime with a life sentence that isn't really a factor to motivate or demotivate you from committing the next crime (at least not in terms of racking up penalties).
There is a significant difference here. Raping someone is a physical assault and criminal in itself. Watching a girl voluntarily perform a striptease on a webcam is not. He didn't hold a gun to their heads, he didn't use a knife, he didn't physically overcome them or put them in a situation in which they could reasonably be said to have no choice. He simply gave them a voluntary way out of facing the consequences some poor choices they had made (choices that were legal and therefore gave him no obligation to report to authorities) before he ever came along. Even if the choice were sex and not simply looking the sex would have been consensual. These girls weren't forced.
There is one very big difference between the victims here and the victims of rape and robbery.
One has a reasonable right to assume that nothing they do entitles someone to rape or rob them. One has absolutely no reasonable right to think that nude images and videos they distribute to others won't eventually be leaked and even released publicly. Leaking or releasing the photos/videos might be a shitty thing to do but doesn't even begin to qualify as criminal on any level and the consequences are the fault lies with the one who gave out nude photos/videos not the one who leaked them.
This isn't some criminal act he was withholding information about from authorities in order to extort money. This is just a horny guy giving girls an option to get out of facing the consequences of their actions. The option he gave them might infringe on their sense of modesty but didn't actually hurt them in any way. It wouldn't make a difference to me if he asked them to have sex with him. It isn't like he is forcing them they could always just say no and face the consequences they brought on themselves.
"One can debate the wisdom of sending sexy pictures through email or private messages, but nobody considers it "public nudity"."
Yes but if one has sent said sexy pictures through email or private messages one has already assumed 100% of the responsibility for the consequences of those images being leaked or released. The boyfriend who shared isn't to blame the girlfriend who gave him the material to share needs to take personal responsibility.
This guy got the images they had already distributed and threatened to distribute them more widely. Again, had he done so the responsibility for the consequences is STILL is 100% with the girl who sent nude pictures of herself to others. Those pictures landing on the internet and going public is a predictable and likely consequence.
The only thing different here is that he gave them a chance to avoid the consequences of their actions in exchange for dropping their modesty and letting him see more images/video of them nude. It isn't like he held a gun to their head and forced them to do anything. They could have simply refused and faced the consequences of their bad judgement.
My understanding is that blackmail typically requires a threat of physical harm in exchange for either a financial gain for the blackmailer or financial loss for the blackmailed.
People use leverage to force us to do things we don't want to do all the time without it being blackmail. How many things you haven't wanted to do have you done under either the direct or implied threat of termination at work (write ups, accepting changes in benefits, etc)? Or the threat of prosecution (plea bargins, telling the truth on legal documents)?
Identity theft is using someone's identifying information to steal money. It is highly debatable whether it should be applied to anything else. The law certainly was never intended to be.
That would depend on the force and depend on what they are being forced to do. My wife forced me to put my plate in the dishwasher under threat of cutting my balls off in my sleep last night. My employer forced me to sign a revised employee handbook under threat of termination a few weeks ago. My internet provider made me agree to a contract under threat of refusal of service. My cell phone provider did the same.
People force us to do things we don't want to do under some sort of threat all the time. In this case the threat was to have them face potential consequences they accepted when making nude content and sending it out in the first place (thus providing material he could blackmail them with and those consequences remain their responsibility even if he had followed through) and the consequence was violating their sense of modesty and embarrassing them a bit more.
What he did was morally reprehensible and wrong. But was it criminal? If so, it was fine or probation level criminal not felony and pound me in the ass prison criminal.
Exactly. Some have pointed out repercussions of having nude photos publicly exposed but he didn't make them photograph themselves nude to begin with or make them send said photos and videos to someone else. They did that all on their own. There has to be some personal accountability there as well.
This isn't at all like playing blame the victim in a rape case or the like. In that scenario the victim should have a reasonable expectation that they won't be violently attacked and raped no matter what they do. In the case of a girl (especially an attractive one) giving out nude photos and videos the expectation should be that they WILL be leaked to some degree at some point. At some point you break up, you get divorced, someone finds them, or he brags to a buddy and shows them a glimpse. It is a completely predictable and avoidable outcome. The power is hers to predict and avoid it so the blame for the outcome hers not on the one who finds/leaks/views it.
The sympathy factor drops substantially when you realize she didn't have to make nude photos of herself and send them to someone to begin with.
"Give him probation and community service for privacy/womens rights or similar. Teach him a useful lesson instead of making him a hardened criminal."
Exactly.
" There have been multiple cases where people have lost their jobs, spouses, or visitation with children as a result of graphic/nude images being made public."
They had already made nude imagery and given it to others. That is how he blackmailed them. I don't want to blame the victim but at some point personal accountability does come in to play. All of those things could well have resulted from sharing the same nude pictures/videos with the people he was pretending to be.
"This person is being charged with blackmail and computer intrusion. Not embarrassing people."
True but he is being charged with blackmail and computer intrusion because he embarrassed people in a way that strikes the moral outrage nerve. He is also being charged with identity theft. Either we need to raise the bar for identity theft way beyond simply logging on to someone's facebook account or we need to drastically reduce the penalties. I log in to my wife's email and facebook accounts all the time and she mine. Does that make us guilty of identity theft?
I do too, 350x the fine.
That doesn't make it a normal thing.
In most cases business insurance does not allow companies to hire felons. Even if something completely unrelated came up that required a large payout the insurance company could discover the violation and refuse to pay out.
"Why? Then you just trivialize what he did and make it so other people can do this."
Because what he did was trivial. He tricked some girls into letting him see them naked. OMG. They are just bodies for god sake we all have them and they will all show them to hundreds of guys over the course of their life and regret many of those times. But but he LIED. Yes he lied and those same girls will no doubt have been lied to by every guy they sleep with to some degree or another. All men are willing to lie or withhold, or otherwise twist the truth to get laid.
What he did is morally reprehensible but hardly criminal. It makes him worthy of despising and calling a pig but then so would a more severe action like cheating on a girlfriend.
"a $500 fine for criminally using someone else's account? No way"
He didn't use someone's bank account. He used their social networking account in a way that results in absolutely no tangible damage to anyone. The bar for identity theft can't just be pretending to be someone else in a harmless prank and if that is going to be the bar then yes the punishments have to dropped to something appropriate for a harmless prank. What next? If he pretends to be a friend confirming his alibi to his girlfriend/wife on the phone so he can sleep around we charge him with identity theft and communications fraud?
"I'm sure some people find that kind of thing fun, but the simple fact is that the damage is greater than getting many STDs."
Not really. The only possible damage is a little embarrassment. We shouldn't be sending someone to prison over violating someone's sense of modesty and embarrassing them. There is an offense there but an action that does no more harm than potentially stirring up an emotion shouldn't result in effectively permanently destroying the life of the person doing it (which prison time does regardless of duration).
20 years doesn't seem relatively mild. Any actual prison time seems relatively severe. A prison sentence means never being employed in a real job again and likely physical assault and rape. Does offending a few people's sense of modesty really justify doing that to someone regardless of how many people he did it to?
Some sort of small fine seems appropriate here. Maybe $500 that should be enough to discourage most people from this type of behavior.
"No. The language was, possibly still is, a badly defined mess."
No, you just don't know Perl.
"It's fine to write while (<file1>), right? It's fine to write while (a && b), right?"
Yes to the first and no to the second. It would result in an error about bare words I believe. Anyone who ever wrote any Perl, and I'm talking a single afternoon farting around with online tutorial, would know that. At least it does if you use strict and warnings, I couldn't tell you what it does without because I always use strict and warnings. You do use strict and use warnings, right?
"But it's not fine to use two handles with a logical in a while test."
It is perfectly fine. It seems likely that you, in your ignorance, assumed that one of the filehandle lines would be automatically assigned to $_ when in reality you are using them for a comparison and throwing them away. Relying on $_ is bad form and leads to hard to read and understand code and things breaking in strange places. What you probably wanted was while(<FILEA> && defined(my $line = <FILEB>)) or maybe while(defined(my $linea = <FILEA>) && defined(my $lineb = <FILEB>)).
"Like placing parentheses around an expression doesn't alter its value"
Huh? Unless you mean for order of operations purposes where it certainly does have an impact in Perl you must just be nitpicking about syntax style. Just like you do when you complain about Perl making use of many symbols. There is no such thing as a correct syntax style provided it is functional and consistent which Perl's certainly is. You are asserting a pure aesthetic preference as if it were the way things should be (or shouldn't be in this case). You sound like a Pythonite.
There are no shortage of purpose built languages that were designed for a specific purpose. Javascript is a web language, PHP is a web language. These languages were designed for web content and that is what they are primarily used for. They can be used for other things but you are using a tool for something other than it's designed purpose.
Perl's intention is not a particular purpose at all but to work like real language in the sense that the meaning of elements within the language is context related and not static regardless of context.
"people are realizing that (a) web programming isn't rocket science and (b) most people need modifications of existing"
Doesn't have much relevance to Perl or whether Perl is suddenly going to die as Perl is not about web programming. That is only one of many many things that people have used Perl for. I think you'll find that most serious Perl programmers weren't really thrilled about dealing with hobbyist web programmers when it was the popular choice to fill this hole.
My anecdotal experience (developing on systems doing millions of matches against complex expressions in a huge bank of patterns daily) indicate that the disparity is going in Perl's favor over time. And you need an optimization for your specific work case you might just find it is already there. I was thinking about building essentially the exact same functionality when I found the perl "study" function for instance.
People think Perl is dead and static because it has been Perl 5 forever but Perl is anything but static. Perl 5 sees tons of development, not just bug fixes and optimizations but major functionality additions. I just updated my copy of the camel book which was two editions out of date. Both covered Perl 5 and it is just a new edition of the same book. But the book has tripled in size and most of the new features are only covered in light detail. Because Perl 6 has essentially been designed major functional improvements to the Perl 6 model are still just Perl 5 updates. For instance there has been a couple of major overhauls of perl threading all within Perl 5.
Perl is definitely still the right solution. Python is something made by people who don't know Perl and think they know what code should look like. So they made a language that offers no benefits over Perl and has enforced white space. If you already properly indent your code there is really nothing to be gained using Python and Python isn't as well suited as Perl to many tasks. Python doesn't have anything has comprehensive as CPAN... no other language does. There are CPAN like solutions out there but they aren't anywhere near as comprehensive.
First of all, a lack of braces makes code much more difficult to follow. That equates to ugly in my mind. The other thing people harp on are the magic variables in Perl. Seriously, there are only a half dozen in common usage. I think most of the people harping on Perl don't like that you need to know Perl to read Perl (or to write it correctly). It isn't a language that lends itself well to sitting down with a reference and applying your C knowledge. Well written Perl is certainly quite readable for a Perl programmer.