What rubbish, an attacker similarly needs to understand every possible attack vector to be able to find a point of entry. They don't just magically happen upon an attack vector and then ignore the system, it takes a lot of time and effort to approach just about all different angles. If they carry out more than one attack in their life time, it's unlikely they'll be able to exploit the exact same vector every time so they'll have to cover many different angles to find ways in.
Unless you're talking about script kiddies who use pre-discovered exploits, but I'm pretty sure that's not what the GP was referring to - he was talking about hackers that actually find methods of entry in the first place, and you cannot do that reliably if you only understand one small part of a system.
The attacker just does not get some big magical arrow over the company pointing to a part of it saying "attack here, this is where an exploit is".
One of the fundamental reasons why attackers are some of the best defenders in security is because to attack, they not only have to be astoundingly competent technically, but have to be extremely good at out thinking of the things no one else has - and that's really key. To attack you genuinely have to be on the cutting edge and be able to consider issues no one else has before. you even mention yourself that the attackers can afford to fail frequently, which has the implication that they'll have to try again - here's a hint, when they fail what do you think they do? they'll have to attempt at another part of the system which they'll then need to understand. Even the script kiddies like Lulzsec had to gain an understanding of the wider system for their HBGary hack which makes a decent case study - their attack involved SQL injection, social engineering, password cracking all of which allowed them to penetrate deeper and deeper.
Just as you've implicitly generalised all attackers as script kiddies who use single pre-discovered attack vectors and nothing more one might equally generalise about the countless "security consultants" working on the defence side of things who think securing a system is about running some pre-written pen testing software and seeing if the UI shows a bunch of ticks and a bunch of crosses, and if it shows any crosses, just installing the latest updates. The point being that that doesn't make you secure against competent attackers - it's the same flawed doctrine that anti-virus software uses, by largely only defending against known threats with a bunch of weak heuristics on top to detect similar threats it completely fails in the face of new threats. The only time I've ever seen AV software find anything in the last 10 - 20 years is when it's already infected the system and too late for the AV software to do anything about it. Much of the defensive security industry is a complete sham in this respect, it's built on a lie that it is somehow going to keep you safe, when in reality it mostly just slows your computer down with it's bloat and gets in your way with it's renewal nag screens.
The problem is that many of the "unhealthy" foods have been done in an even more unhealthy way than necessary.
For example, when schools were serving things like burgers and chips, they were often serving the most cheap, unhealthy burgers they could get their hands on, and similarly providing the most unhealthy of chips.
In the UK, Jamie Oliver's campaign for healthy meals hasn't really helped much, there was a report suggesting a temporary increase in exam performance for some middle class kids, which may well have been the result of something else, but that was the extent of it. Other than that it led to half a million kids no longer eating school meals, and cost the best part of half a billion pounds, whilst doing nothing to stop or slow the increase in childhood obesity.
So as with everything it seems to be about balance, if you go too far to any extreme as we did listening to Jamie Oliver you risk polarising the debate, and pushing many people away from the problem altogether. You still need to provide meals that kids will enjoy like burgers and chips now and again, but you should use good quality meat, cook them in a way that maximises fat drain off and so forth. Similarly, pizza is often demonised but the way they're made fresh in the Med is very different to the packaged garbage that was being served in schools.
The problem with the view of only providing healthy food is that there is a danger that this is taken to the Jamie Oliver extreme of serving food that will push most kids away from the scheme altogether, which led to the rather awful scene of parents pushing unhealthy meals through the school gates to their kids instead. At the end of the day it doesn't matter how healthy your meal is, if kids wont eat it it wont benefit them, the key is to provide food they will eat, but maximise the healthiness of it. If you couple this with other measures like improving the capacity for kids to exercise then the whole thing will be far more effective than the polarising scenario we ended up with here in the UK that was of no net benefit in the long run, and may actually have made things worse whilst costing a lot of money. Whilst it's true that many kids don't like sports either, it's often more a case of offering the right sports, I was never really a fan of field sports myself, but when my school got it's own swimming pool I loved it. Similarly when Tennis became an option, I enjoyed it. I'd wager therefore that whilst some money was needed improving school dinners to some extent, much of the money would've been better spent expanding the amount of exercise kids can opt to do in schools - the schools that offer things as varied as swimming, rugby, football, judo, badminton, tennis do far better in terms of participation than those who tell the kids they've got to get out on the field in barely above zero rainy weather and get muddy playing rugby where the "sick notes" become quote prolific.
So yeah, again, the key is about balance - try to force any extreme and minimise choice and it wont work. I believe "healthier meals" is the key, rather than "healthy meals" which has become a synonym for the things many kids just wont eat.
I don't think I've ever made anyone cry by insulting Jamie Oliver before, I apologise, I didn't realise he had worshippers here on Slashdot.
But for what it's worth, might I just add that if you're going to try and insult someone that you should at very least try and say something that makes at least some kind of sense? Someone who has pointed out that someone who himself is looking a little on the overweight side isn't really in a position to preach about how to live a healthy lifestyle isn't exactly likely to be someone who is themselves overweight.
You see, here is the thing, I eat things like chips, burgers, and chocolate now and again amongst the more healthy stuff, and I'm a perfectly healthy weight, and am perfectly healthy in general, but that's probably because I walk at least 4 miles a day (2 miles as part of my commute, and at least 2 with the dogs on an evening). This is why I at least advocate that the best solution is simply to get a good balance of everything in general rather than focus on one single specific dietary regime that frankly, isn't going to suit, help, or interest everyone. You see, no matter how much you try and bore the kids into shape with Jamie's dinners it's simply not going to solve the weight problem in itself and does more harm than good in putting kids off school meals altogether.
Sorry if the concept that St. Jamie might actually be wrong offends you, but well, there you go, as I say, if St. Jamie really knew better and that his cooking was the only one true way then he wouldn't be struggling to keep a trim healthy figure himself would he?
Of course, this was obvious enough by the fact that despite 8 years having passed, despite half a billion pounds having been spent on Jamie's plan, childhood obesity has continued to increase, and half a million kids less are eating school dinners now than were previously.
But yeah, keep on trolling in defence of Jamie if you want, if that's what makes you feel better about whatever problems you have.
"Well, either the extradition request conforms to the treaty or it doesn't. Since a UK court looked at it and found it legal, whatever Sweden has must be sufficient."
Sure but this doesn't mean it was fair. Like much legislation it seems the extradition treaty was poorly thought through and implemented without a thought as to what happens if it is abused.
This is the same problem we have for example with web snooping laws, it sounds great when politicians promise that it's simply for catching criminals, but it never ends that way does it?
"If the CIA wants to abduct Assange in violation of EU law, they can do that from the UK, they don't have to go to Sweden."
Contrary to the claims that the UK is an American lapdog, it does at least stand up for itself on some such issues. The UK political class is already struggling to justify the extradition of people like Gary McKinnon, adding Assange to the tally would've just ended the current UK-US extradition and blocked any attempt at a similar one. Sweden has in recent years been far more willing to be a US lapdog with the pirate bay raids that turned out to be unjustified under Sweden law, and the later show trial overseen by a judge who was a member of an MPAA affiliated lobby group. The lower courts that decide most trials in the UK are much more independent and generally do a pretty good job, the problem for the likes of the US is that they're not a sure thing, they cannot be guaranteed to do what they want - look at the OiNK case, the decision was fair and just, but it pissed America off no end, hence why we ended up hearing British police telling the FBI along the lines of "we're sorry, we could have done better, we'll do whatever you want from now". Even where British politicians are corrupt, where the newer puppet supreme court which is more easily politically influenced than past courts have been are corrupt, much of the rest of the British judiciary does a damn good job of retaining it's independence.
"And if the US wants to extradite Assange under an extradition agreement with Sweden because he has been indicted in the US, that's legal and I don't have a problem with it. I don't see why you should either."
Well it's really not. Part of the EU extradition treaty is that it has a safeguard stating it cannot be used to extradite to third states. This is really what's key - whether Sweden decides to ignore this or not. I care because it's an affront to justice, if you don't care, then I don't really have much to say to you - I'm not really interested in people who are of the lynch mob mentality, that sort of irrational mindset cannot be reasoned with and belongs to an era long past it's sell by date.
But I get the impression you're not the sort of person who cares about the facts of the case and are simply trying to push the political ideology that seeks revenge for his embarassment of the US and other world governments, so I doubt what I say matters to you.
Personally I don't care what happens to him, but I do care about the continued abuse of the EU-US relations, and poor laws that continue to infringe civil liberties and are a complete affront to justice people like my grandfather fought for. Assange may well be guilty and I could care less if he is, but I want him dealt with fairly, and sensibly. If he's going to be convicted because he's genuinely guilty he needs to be convicted without any doubt. The shenanigans surrounding this case leave more room for doubt that he isn't guilty, than he is, even if a Swedish court finds him such, and that in itself is a problem- because so much subversiveness has taken place in his case he's always going to be innocent to some people, even if he is in fact a rapist, and that stinks as much as anything too. The proper authorities in Sweden should've investigated, the proper authorities in Sweden should've questioned like they questioned anyone else, and the proper authorities should've issued the extradition request as was the intention of the extradition treaty, if not the wordin
The problem is that he hasn't even been charged, extradition for mere questioning is pretty odd.
The most sensible option was to do what Assange's council proposed - the Swedish police question him in person, or via video link in the UK, and if they feel there is enough evidence, then charge him.
The fact it's a prosecutor getting him extradited for questioning with no charges yet filed, and the fact the prosecutor is from a different region to that in which the crimes happened and would hence be normally responsible, and the fact that there is evidence the prosecutor coerced these women into actually filing the charges when they previously weren't interested in doing so is cause for concern that this is politically motivated, that the prosecution know they can't charge him on this due to lack of evidence, but need to get him into the country for a US extradition stitch up - at least, that is what Assange is concerned about.
If they question him, and have enough evidence to charge, then they could simply do it that way and at least give the whole thing a semblance of looking legitimate whether it is or not.
It's not unusual for suspects to be questioned remotely in the country they're in, or by visiting police, so it's a little odd that they're so desperate to avoid that in this case and so desperate to pluck him out the UK with so many obscure procedural quirks that don't normally happen such as the prosecutor issuing the extradition request rather than the police or courts.
The danger is, if he is extradited, the whole thing is dropped because of lack of evidence to actually charge and then they go "Oh, but while you're hear, our friends in the US want a word, so we've booked a flight, it leaves in an hour to take you out of European jurisdiction where you're no longer protected to argue against this kind of illegal rendition...".
To be fair I never got them at school, but please don't tell Jamie Oliver or he'll shit bricks and give the whole nation a lecture again on how it's disgusting that we dare to let children have a choice of what to eat or allow parents to consider letting them eat anything other than Jamie's menu.
All whilst he continues to become even more of a fatso himself, proving the point that it's actually got fuck all to do with whether you eat chips (fries for non-British) now and again or not, because Jamie gets Jamie's immaculately healthy dinners every night but is still getting rather more weighty. It's more about how your metabolism copes with different food, relative to how much exercise you get coupled with the volume and frequency of food you consume. It's not a problem you can simply solve by changing the menus to make them piss fucking boring for most children such that they don't bother to eat a healthy amount at all- it's far more complex than that.
Honestly, I'd rather Gordon Ramsey had been given the role of dealing with the problem of childhood obesity rather than Jamie Oliver because at least Gordon shouting at the kids "Stop eating shit you fat little fuck" would've been an awful lot more amusing if nothing else, but then, that's probably why I wouldn't ever be any good at working with kids.
Well I'm sure if you go down to your local rape crisis centre and say that you'll find no women who disagree, nope, none at all. Anyone who has been involved with rape victims, either because they themselves were raped and went to the crisis centre and met other victims, or simply because they like to help them out will be able to point you to many cases, perhaps even their own.
Seriously, if you hate Assange, that's fine. But don't talk bullshit and trivialise the issue with it simply because you want to try and bolster the view that the decision against Assange was nothing unusual.
The only point you could really bring up that would be valid is that it's usually jury cases that decide this sort of thing, but perhaps there's the problem, that Assange didn't get the benefit of having the case decided by his peers.
See this article, which highlights the problem well and has many parallels to Assange's case:
Still, I look forward to those citations that prove that there has never been any inconsistency in this sort of thing when you're back at your desk and that all, if not at least the vast majority of such decisions have been the same.
The fundamental issue is that these are different interpretations of the law than those reached in hundreds of other past similar cases, including some far more aggressive than this.
I feel sorry for those girls who have been told by the courts they weren't raped in far less pleasant ordeals than this, yet this, a much more borderline case, is affirmed as rape.
Experience isn't born of the amount of time doing something, it's born of how effectively you do something in that time.
When you're making comments that show a dire lack of understanding about the points we're discussing (e.g. mathematical induction as I pointed out) then yes, I'd call that inexperience.
You can't criticise something when you don't have a full picture of it, which, from your comments, you clearly do not.
"My requirements aren't strict. I prefer to use a single stack for development (ranging from something that can be used on an embedded system to a very busy webserver), and that relies on pieces of software that are easy to maintain (such as nginx, apache, etc). As I said before, there are valid reasons to use PHP."
You think PHP is the tool for that wide a range of applications? seriously? I think you really prove the point I made earlier that those who believe PHP is the solution to everything are too inexperienced to understand why it isn't.
"If you believe this, then you have no idea how computers work. And trust isn't a variable, its a property - you either have it, or you don't. If you cannot guarantee that a given test gives you 100% coverage of all use cases, then they cannot be used to assert quality or reliability of the code."
This only further proves the previous point, it seems you don't actually understand what mathematical induction is, because you've glossed over the point about it with some nonsensical tosh that seems to imply that no testing is as good as 99% assurance. That's worrying if you're writing software professionally.
"But hey, facebook too. And Yahoo. And a bunch of other big-ass companies. The "web" part? AFAIK Google relies on a mix of C++ and Python, Facebook relies (mostly) on PHP, and I have no idea what Yahoo uses these days."
Have you even heard of things like JSF? Again you seem to be highlighting your inexperience more than anything.
"Maybe in the future, but not today. And RoR isn't even in the same league."
Why not today? the only reason I can think is hosting availability, other than that they don't perform any worse, but facilitate far better quality software development, with no decrease in speed of development.
"What is so good about delimited paradigms? In the end, it all gets translated to ones an zeros."
Do you even have any concept of the basic principles surrounding good software development such as modularity and separation of concerns? I'm guessing not if you don't understand the importance of paradigms that support the task at hand. This is probably also why you don't understand why PHP's lack of functional support related especially to multi-threading is a very bad thing though.
"That is precisely the problem with Java. The "true way". OOP is not a fit-all solution, and the "Java way" isn't the only way. What you call "forces new developers to make shure" I call indoctrination. It is, without doubt, the "enterprise" language, and - as I said - ubiquous. But it's not a best fit for everything, and it is flawed by design - it assumes that the programmer doesn't know what he wants.I like freedom of implementation."
That's really just a roundabout way of saying "I could never really be arsed to learn to structure programs properly or the benefits of doing so, I prefer to just hack shit together anyway that works without a care of any side effects in terms of poor security, poor code quality, and poor maintainability." I agree OOP isn't the only solution out there, but for most stuff people do it's the best option. This is especially the case when it comes to the web where like 90% of stuff is CRUD which does map extremely well to OO development.
"That is YOUR view on the matter"
Well, mine and just about all other programmers who have a wealth of experience writing respectably sized web applications in a number of different languages such as PHP, Java, and C#.
One only has to look at the vast majority of PHP tutorials out there relating to databases where there are still recommendations to push queries to the DB that are vulnerable to SQL injection to see the scale of the problem.
"Most people aren't really good at anything, and (from my experience) most programmers (regardless of the language) have no clue about how software actually works, or how different paradigms are implemented. Is that relevant? No. The notion of language "purity" is pedantic."
"Please do tell, what scripting/dynamic language can I use that is multiplatform, has a rich library of modules, runs well as CGI and has an apache module available, can be run from CLI easily, has at least equivalent PHP performance, can be used for OOP or procedural programming, and isn't Python or Perl? Because you sound like there's a ton of choices available."
Well, if you ensure your requirements are that strict and eliminate the alternatives then yes, you wont find anything other than PHP. But in the real world the requirements are rarely ever quite that strict, and there'd be no logical reason to arbitrarily just eliminate the alternatives.
"I do understand what you are saying, but if you were a C programmer, there would also be literally hundreds of extremely subtle issues that can cause real bugs, that wouldn't be catched at compile time. Shure, most of those issues aren't clearly defects of the language (and most PHP ones are), but the result is the same - silent failure."
No there aren't, that's precisely the point. Pretty much everything that can trip you up in something like C is well known and is there as part of a design decision, the same can't be said for PHP, it's issues are far more numerous, far more subtle, and aren't there as any coherent design decision - they're there by accident, they're poorly documented, and most prominently, they're far, far more numerous, and that's the issue. You expect quirks in every language but PHP's are more serious, more numerous, and more subtle.
"1) TDD is mostly useless because the testcases cannot cover the entire range of values and options (execution paths) of the code being tested;"
If you're building bad tests sure, but you shouldn't need to test the full range of variables, if you have even a basic understanding of the concept of mathematical induction it should be trivial to build a fairly safe test case that covers the most important, often small set of inputs required to give a good degree of trust in code. As the PHP developers don't even understand the far more basic concepts of transitivity though, I'm not suprised they struggle with this. It's also worth noting that TDD isn't going to be much help if you just ignore the test results and ship anyway without fixing problems, even when your code doesn't pass it's own tests, which is precisely what the PHP folks did - shipped code that failed to pass it's own unit tests.
"2) most of the quirks of PHP can be worked around (as somewhat proved by the ton of functional applications available)"
If you're aware of them, which 99% of PHP developers aren't. The functional applications argument is a bit of a weak argument, because it ignores the many bugs that haven't been discovered, and the fact that PHP applications are far and away the most hacked and exploited nowadays. Yes, there's plenty of stuff out there that just about works, but that's the stuff that has managed to make it through, it doesn't of course factor in all the applications where they gave up on PHP, where they ported to something else, and it ignores the massive disparity of security exploits against apps built in PHP compared to those built in say Java.
"What kind of evidence do you want? Try to load a webpage made for Netscape 6.0 that uses Javascript on a modern browser. Show me a CMS available since 2002 that hasn't been rewritten at least once, and still works well. Go ahead, and try to run an ASP application from 2002 on a modern computer. Or Java web application. Or even a Python one."
You can say the same about desktop software, if you haven't noticed things like Visual Studio, Microsoft office etc. get updated every couple of years, sometimes with major rewrites (i.e. Visual Studio 2010 switching to WPF for it's UI). There are similarly examples of web sites that have been running since the early days of the web with nothing more than updates throughout their life - Amazon has been around since 1994, IMDB since 94, eBay since 95. The web just isn't old enough to have the number o
Yes, I think to put your point more simply, the thing about Turing is that he was one of the 20th centuries mathematical greats.
Like Fermat in the 17th century, Newton in the 17th/18th century, etc. people like Godel and Turing were the equivalent mathematical greats of the 20th century, and because their contributions are so relatively recent, the ripples of the effect of their work are still being felt to this day.
In another hundred or two hundred years, Turing's name will be listed alongside everyone from Archimedes, to Fermat, to Newton, and so on, as a mathematician, his work was simply that important to humanity.
"PHP is used for one thing and one thing only - to generate CGI-like applications that shit webpages. If you are using it for anything else, you are using it wrong. If you have strange/complex requirements, or need to scale horizontally, you are using it wrong. If you need a stateful environment (where threads usually make sense for some tasks), you are using it wrong. If you need a GUI, you are using it wrong. Etc etc."
I don't disagree, but the point is other technologies do all that and do it better, so again, why bother PHP?
"but bad PHP code is usually easy to spot"
If you believe this, I suspect you're one of those people who doesn't actually understand why PHP is bad. One of the biggest problems with PHP is that it has literally hundreds of extremely subtle issues that can cause real bugs (e.g. reversed ternary operator chaining). These issues aren't simple to spot, no matter how good you think you are, and this is really the fundamental problem.
"Can't say the same for Python or Java. And the quirks."
Absolutely you can, because they don't have these hundreds of quirks that PHP has, not to mention that Java wont even compile some of the things that PHP will silenty fail on.
"Because the application is basicly re-initialized from scratch each time it is run, you want it to exit as soon as possible"
Er, that's the whole point of threading - if you want something to happen in the background, you can throw it off in a thread, and respond to the client without having to wait for that processing to finish. This ironically means you can't exit as soon as possible and respond to the client in some cases, you have to wait for processing to end, even if that processing isn't necessary for the client to receive their response.
"There were some projects in the past that tried to implement thread support and failed - mostly, due to the fact that most libraries that PHP uses weren't threaded, and general lack of interest. "
Lack of interest being because anyone needing it just ended up using a proper language, like Java, instead, not because it's unnecessary.
"I personally hate Python. I cannot use a language that treats me like a child. But yes, Python can be used in a plethora of cases where PHP is a bad idea - but, if I'm using Python, why not use anything else?"
I agree, I don't like Python either, but the point is that if you have Python as an option, then PHP is always a bad idea, because even for the small niche areas where you can just about get away with PHP, Python does it better, as does for example, RoR.
"The same argument can be applied to any language. PHP (with a decent framework) is quite usable, easy to learn/troubleshoot (despite of the quirks), and delivers."
Again, if you believe this, then I'm not convinced you're aware of PHP's many subtle issues. They are well documented, most recently, and probably most extensively here:
"Web-based applications tipically have a (much) shorter lifespan than desktop applications, so even the long-run cost of "maintenance" isn't a real problem."
Do you have any evidence to back this up? The only reason I can see it being true is that the web hasn't been around as long as the desktop, there's no evidence that I'm aware of that web applications get taken down and replaced quicker than desktop applications.
The problem is that your argument seems to be weighted entirely on the rather weak get out clause that if PHP has failed then someone is doing it wrong. Therein lies the fundamental problem, it means anyone using PHP is always doing it wrong, because relative to use other options, PHP is always a failure - it's always inherently more buggy, slower to develop with, poorer performing, harder to maintain or a mix of those issues than just using an alternative technology would be, so again, what redeeming features does PHP have that make it better than any of the alternatives like Python or RoR, or even something JIT'd like C# or Java?
Yes, the problem is when double standards are used.
The government went against their excuse quoted by the GP in pardoning long dead World War I soldiers who were convicted of cowardice.
This has the implication that government believes some past crimes (homosexuality) don't deserve pardons, but others (cowardice) do.
The reality is many Tory MPs are still homophobic bigots, as we're seeing to be the case now that gay marriage has come up and the Tories are the biggest potential barrier to it, so to pardon Turing would've upset many of the Tory backbench, whilst pardoning a bunch of people who were equally legitimately convicted under the rules at the time for cowardice is a populist move to make a bunch of whiners who aren't even old enough to have known their ancestors tried for cowardice shut the fuck up is acceptable.
So the excuse is just "blah blah blah bullshit", the real reason is still political, whether you feel it's the right thing to do or not, your feeling on whether pardons should or shouldn't be given is not the actual reason a pardon was not given unfortunately. As you're no doubt aware, rationality is rarely ever the purpose for doing anything in politics.
There's no doubt Turing was persecuted, and no doubt he was a genius, but he wasn't persecuted because he was a genius that's the point.
The term "persecuted genius" is related to the idea of someone being persecuted because they had ideas that were ahead of their time, but were offensive, to say, the church, and so were persecuted for those ideas, even though those ideas were factually correct.
Gallileo is the obvious example, he figured out that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than the prominent and rather arrogant view at the time that the entire universe revolved around Earth (and to some degree, everything in the universe revolved around mankind). The Vatican rather hated this view and eventually forced him to spend the rest of his life under house arrest for it.
There was no problem with the ideas Turing put forth, no one was persecuting him for his groundbreaking work in maths and computing, rather they were persecuting him for his sexual orientation. In other words, rather than the term "persecuted genius" which has a specific meaning and background to it, it's probably better to say that he was a genius, that was persecuted.
For what it's worth I have a Dell sitting around somewhere that's 15.4" and 1900x1200, so you didn't even have to go up to 17" for that previously.
I've not looked at the market in a while, presumably it's not improved and getting a 15" laptop with anything close to this resolution is still now impossible giving the appearance that the technology magically doesn't exist to squeeze this many pixels onto a laptop screen even though we used to have it?
"Actually, Argentina's claim helps the British politicians to bolster nationalism and that way getting support."
I'm not sure this is true, if only because the Falklands issue never comes up on British politician's timetables. The recent Falklands tensions for example came up when Britain's government was fairly fresh and new, and still largely in it's honeymoon period, and still rating very highly in the polls. Why would they care to use it when they're not even struggling?
I don't deny it helps them when it is brought up, and if they are unpopular, but they're certainly not the ones dictating the timing - Argentina is and whilst yes, it may be used more internally, it's hard for Britain to not answers attempts at involving the international community at the UN because at that point it really has to answer, besides it's response is always just "We're not going to discuss it unless the islanders want it discussed" so it's not as if they really ratchet up the rhetoric.
I think the British government does want it solved, because it's costly for us to maintain a military prescence down there as a precautionary force, I think our government would love to not have to do that. Similarly I think even past Argentinian administrations have wanted it solved, there was progress to that in the 90s where Argentina was happy to accept our sovereignty over the islands, as long as they got preferential treatment when it came to any oil exploration etc. but again the Argentinian's pulled out when their economy started to run into trouble and things got tough politically. I'd agree with you if we were bringing up the issue, and we were doing so when our governments were struggling politically, but the timing just doesn't match the theory.
Perhaps the thing that saddens me the most is that Argentina is such a beautiful country, with so much potential, yet it continues to elect the most politically inept people possible that ruin things for not just Argentinians, but people like us who would rather not have to deal with the bullshit too, and even the Brazilians, Chileans, etc. are getting a bit concerned at how crazy the Kirchner administration is now getting beginning to follow the line of some of the worlds biggest kooks like Chavez and getting friendly with Ahmadinejad, when they've got some perfectly sane, perfectly competent neighbours right next door whom they'd be better off aligning and working with.
I hope one day Argentina just focusses on it's own self improvement, that relations can improve. Making it easier for British people to get to the Falklands isn't ever going to help their claim, but it'd sure as hell help their prospects of joining in the exploiting of oil/gas resources around the islands, and it'd sure as hell boost British, and even European tourism to Argentina and the islands. There's so much scope for things to be so much better, but Argentina first needs to sort it's political class the fuck out. Our politicians are pretty bad, but they're not Kirchner/Chavez/Ahmadinejad bad, and that's the problem. Argentina really should follow Brazil's lead where Brazil's political class are far from puppets of the West and are very independently minded, but aren't so irrational that they think it's a good idea to get in bed with the likes of Chavez either. With a stronger Argentina, South America as a whole could become so much more important a voice, and so much more beneficial to the world as a whole on the world stage as another independent grouping of countries that could bring a counter balancing viewpoint to both the EU/America, Russia, and China. South American states for example do a fantastic job of pushing for greater marine protection in the Atlantic and Western Pacific.
The irony is also, that if Argentina was a strong, progressive, modern nation, the Falkland islanders may then decide themselves to either go independent from Britain with closer links to Argentina, or pass under Argentinian leadership without all this drama in the middle, and at that point, even if the British
There were native Georgians in South Ossetia being expelled by Russians and separatists, as well as the territory being used to attack Georgia proper, that's the problem.
This is in stark contrast to the Falklands where there is no native Argentinian population and where they hasn't really been any number of settled Argentinians in almost 200 years, and where the only aggression surrounding the islands has repeatedly come from Argentina, militarily in '82, and economically in terms of blockades now.
"Well, I'm one of the guys that usually counter-arguments on the "PHP is evil" rants, and I create code professionally, so I guess I'm a "professional" programmer. I've never seen a PHP programmer saying it is a well designed language - on the contrary. Anyone that actually uses PHP knows it is an half-assed attempt at nothing, riddled with inconsistencies and unexpected behaviours. I probably could point out some serious problems with "acceptable" languages such as C, or inconsistencies in a language that is the "elefant in the room" (Javascript), but the list of defects of those languages combined probably isn't remotely close to the problems PHP has. That said, there are areas where PHP shines - and, while there are alternatives - PHP still is a viable choice. As a programmer, I like how it does not force a paradigm down my throat, and gives me the liberty to freely implement how I choose to. I wouldn't use it for GUI programming (I know, someone else thought it was a good idea), or for complex database handling, and yes, the internet is full of piss-poor PHP code, but know what else? You have piss-poor JAVA code too. And C. And python. And every other language you can think of."
I agree with much of what you say, but your only counter argument is simply that there are problems with other languages, and code in other languages too.
Yes, that's absolutely true, but as you say yourself the problems in languages don't even come close in number, nor in seriousness of defects. I don't like the fact C# has shortcut property initialisers which don't also make it trivial to instantiate properties at declaration like you can variables meaning you lose that benefit. I also don't like that Java doesn't have operator overloading. But you know what? all that pales to the fact that PHP outright just doesn't even support multi-threading for crying out loud. A fundamentally important concept in modern computing and most certainly in scalable web apps and it just doesn't even support it.
The fact you get bad code in every language doesn't excuse the fact that you inherently get more bad code in PHP because there are just so many language pitfalls that 99% of PHP developers aren't even aware of but will without question eventually stumble over without realising it. It doesn't change the fact that interpreted languages are inherently more prone to errors for the most part because there is no compile time error checking that force you fix at least some of the most obvious bugs or the app wont even try to run. So yes, other languages have bad code, but in PHP it's inherently far far worse a problem, and unnecessarily so beyond the fact the language is abysmally designed.
"If you need parallel programming, PHP (and VB6:D) is not an acceptable choice. If what you meant was lack of thread support, well, I'd say threads - while valid in some contexts - are overused and often create more problems than they solve."
Right, but that's not an excuse for not having them, because it means that if you don't even have them, then where it is the right solution to the problem, they don't even exist, meaning PHP fundamentally outright prevents you implementing the correct solution to some problems.
"As you said "anyone with even a basic understanding if computer science" can work around them in many (most?) cases."
The problem is that the workaround is often too costly. It involves the sort of things Facebook has had to do - throwing far more money at data centers than necessary if it was developed with more suitable technology from the outset, writing your own PHP to C++ translator to try and work around it, writing your own Java-esque PHP VM also. There's the problem right there - at that point, you might as well just use something else.
So this really highlights the problem with your argument, your argument is that PHP can do stuff, well yeah it can, sure, but the problem is it doesn't do stuff better than anything else. It's not as well designed an interpreted language as Python
"1. AFAIK Argentina never "accepted British sovereignty""
It wasn't Argentina's to accept. Argentina didn't exist as it does now at the time Britain claimed sovereignty.
"2. The current government of Argentina was elected in 2011 with more than 50% of the votes. I'd be cautious about calling that 'political incompetence'."
There are many examples of politicians getting elected with a strong voter base, it doesn't mean they were in any way competent leaders though. That is after all the fundamental problem with populism - it plays to people's most basic instincts and attracts large support, but it's ultimately detrimental to a country. I'd call your country being in a complete shit state despite having all the benefits of thriving nations like Brazil available for you to exploit political incompetence for sure. An obvious example is George Bush, he got voted in with over 50% of the votes also, but he also managed to do more damage to America's standing in the world, and America's wealth than any other president has done for many decades. Getting voted in doesn't make you politically competent, running a country well to improve your citizens standards of living makes you political competent. Successive Argentinian governments who also bring up the Falklands claim have completely and utterly failed to achieve this, whilst those that have achieved it, never seem too bothered about the Falklands, funny that.
"3. "On 2 January 1833, Captain James Onslow, of the brig-sloop HMS Clio, arrived at the Spanish settlement at Port Louis to request that the Argentine flag be replaced with the British one, and for the Argentine administration to leave the islands."
I'd hardly qualify this as 'settling legitimately', but YMMV"
Right. It's just a shame you didn't paste that in the context of the rest of the Wikipedia article and only read what you wanted to. Here, let me help:
"The British first landed on the Falklands in 1690, when Captain John Strong sailed through Falkland Sound, naming this passage of water after Anthony Cary, 5th Viscount of Falkland, the First Lord of the Admiralty at that time. The British were keen to settle the islands, as they had the potential to be a strategic naval base for passage around Cape Horn.[7] In 1765, Captain John Byron landed on Saunders Island. He then explored other islands' coasts and claimed the group for Britain. The following year, Captain John MacBride returned to Port Egmont, on Saunders, to construct a fort. The British later discovered the French colony at Port Saint Louis, and the first sovereignty dispute began."
Britain was there first with the French, Port Saint Louis was created by France. France nowadays supports the British claim.
"The Spanish expelled the British colony in 1770, but it was restored in 1771 following British threats of war over the islands."
Spain later kicked the British colony that was there first out, but let it back in when Britain threatened war.
"By 1776, the British had left their settlement, leaving behind a plaque asserting British sovereignty over the islands."
Britain pulled out because it needed it's forces for the American revolution, but retained it's claim. British fishermen, whalers etc. continued to visit and use the island. It later resettled there in 1831.
So yes, the small out of context snippet you posted sounds a bit off, but that's what happens when you remove context. Britain requesting peaceful removal of an Argentine flag from territory which it had claimed almost 150 years previously and maintained a settlement and sovereignty claim on, with the Spanish settlement on which Argentina bases it's claim only arriving 80 years later causing the only ambiguity in ownership with a very short forceful 1 year removal of the British settlement since the initial anglo-French dispute before continued British sovereignty kind of rips your "I'd hardly qualify this as 'settling legitimately', but YMMV" comment apart.
If finding some fucking islands in the first place
"The malvinas/falklands issue goes waaaaaay back, centuries back."
Hardly. Argentina issued initial disputes up until 1849 and once in 1885, but then accepted British sovereignty. It was only in 1941 that Argentina decided to bring it up again because as it does now, and as it did in '82 it had a weak government that desperately needed to stir nationalist sentiment to try and bolster it's standing and the Falklands is an easy target. It's really no coincidence that the issue only ever comes up again each time Argentina has a government that's managed to completely fuck up the country through political incompetence.
"But anyway, why does england claim a couple of islands on the other fucking side of the world and nobody thinks that's strange?"
Because it's been inhabited by British people since the 1640s with only a couple of breaks hundreds of years ago?
You could similarly ask why Alaska isn't Russian or Canadian when it's geographically closer to those nations than it is the US.
There's a number of ways to determine the nationality of a nation and geographical proximity is only one of these, others include who got there first, what the population wants, who won it militarily and the fact of the matter is that Britain wins out hands down in all of these - it's questionable whether the British or French got there first, but the French support the British claim regardless, the British have clearly won it militarily when Argentina tried that tactic, and the population is British, and has been for hundreds of years.
Fundamentally though, the United Nation's key point in terms of determining sovereignty is the will of the people living there. This is important, because no one should have to be ruled against their will, and whilst it does get abused (i.e. Russia pushing pro-Georgian people out of Georgian breakaway regions whilst making pro-Russian people Russian citizens to claim the will of the people) it is for the most part the most sensible option. It's also not as if Britain annexed it by pushing out an Argentine population, the British population has been there as long as any (including when the Spanish were there), the Spanish left, Argentina tried to settle elsewhere there on the island but with no British interference failed to do so because they were not prepared for the harsh weather and so gave up and left it.
The fact is the people living there are living their legitimately, their ancestors settled their legitimately, and they did not use any kind of force to push anyone else out. Everyone else that settled/tried to settle left of their own accord. So if the population is there legitimately, and the population wants to be British the case is pretty clear cut - Argentina just doesn't have an argument.
Again, Argentina's claim is about absolutely nothing more than bolstering a weak incompetent government with the time tested tactics of winning over the ignorant amongst society by using nationalism and populism.
It's also worth noting that Britain even offered to work with Argentina on oil exploration etc. around the islands in the late 90s to at least try and improve relations which it did not have to do, but the Argentine government at the time, again, having fucked up the economy, decided it needed to ramp up the populist rhetoric and pulled out going on about sovereignty.
Again, Argentina's arguments would have far more merit if it weren't for the fact that any claims continuously coincide with bad governance and decreasing popularity of the party in government at the time. When Argentinian governments have been doing well in the polls, they've not even brought up the issue, and have even sought to improve relationships, but every time an Argentinian government starts to struggle, it brings it up. It's pathetic.
Yes, well, a lot of so-called "professional" programmers believe PHP is a well designed language, and a good number of them exist on Slashdot.
The problem is that the bar isn't exactly high to be able to call yourself a professional programmer.
A decade or so ago you had to understand things like pointers and so forth, nowadays you can knock together any crock of shit and call yourself a professional programmer. I suppose that's good and bad - good in that humanity gets more software ideas turned into reality, bad in that some of those "professional programmers" go on to be the developers responsible for password security at LinkedIn.
I'm sure I'll get some replies telling me I'm wrong, and that PHP is actually the most awesome thing to have ever arisen, but the poor sods telling me that are somewhat ironically hence going to be the same people I'm talking about. I've been using PHP on a large 18 month project now (and thank fuck it's finally almost over, though I suspect we'll get some uplift work) and if you can't tell what's wrong with it, you really prove my point - to anyone with even a basic understanding of computer science and/or has some experience in producing systems in other mainstream languages it's all quite obvious. Perhaps the most glaring one in this day and age is the complete and utter lack of actual parallel programming support beyond a few awful curl hack libraries.
Really, VB6 is the same thing, different market - the advantage VB6 has is that because it's not generally web facing like PHP the faults that arise from the poor software it allows rarely become a big deal, so it keeps chugging along meaning that yes, exactly as you say, it lets people do what people need to do where there is no professional development resource available to do it, and rarely causes any harm, so I don't really have too much of a problem with it. Ultimately the problems with these sorts of language arise when the program either grows well beyond it's means, or are exposed to the wider world, or the developer behind them gets a bit too ambitious relative to their skillset or the strength of their tools, but if all that's never going to happen I don't think they're necessarily a bad thing.
Despite my comments, I'm not really much of a language bigot, if it works for you then go for it, but with the caveat that you're aware of where problems could arise from your chosen toolset - the problem is with the likes of 99% of PHP developers, and even a good number of developers in general is that they don't have that awareness, whereas the salesperson you mention hacking together their VB6 app, again, somewhat ironically, does.
This got modded informative? Look, it's nothing against you adosch, you're obviously trying to be helpful, but your post is very low quality, and if mods think it's informative it really shows how far Slashdot has fallen.
It sounds like you don't really have much experience in web application development, as those suggestions you put forward simply aren't viable if you want any degree of flexibility. Joomla for example is brutally inflexible, and painful bloated and slow. The real problem is though that you believe Java is somehow similar to Javascript, jQuery is a Javascript library, and Javascript is about as similar to Java, as Afghanistan is to America in terms of culture. They really couldn't be much more different, curly braces is about the only thing they share.
"And NetBeans, and every other IDE that works well with big PHP projects is wrong, because Eclipse can't be a big pile of poo?"
I've been working on a large PHP project in NetBeans for about 18 months now, and by works well I'm assuming you mean "Is only a tiny bit better than just using a text editor with syntax highlighting like Notepad++" ?
Honestly, if PHP and NetBeans is working well then I think it shows the low standards PHP developers have and expect. Compared to something like XCode, JDeveloper, and Visual Studio it's still piss poor. It's not NetBeans fault though, it's simply doing the best it can with a bad language.
Honestly part the reason C# is so quick to develop with and so much more so than other environments is because of Visual Studio. The IDE's intellisense is so many years ahead of anything else there's just little contest. It seems to match intellisense suggestions based on not just the text you type, but possible types of suggestion that are relevant to the context you're typing, so if you type say:
int i = user.
Then after the dot it'll suggest any properties of user that are integers first and foremost for example, but also will consider recently used properties within the same scope etc. - this is an extremely simple answer, when you're working with a more complex line of code it really shines, effectively because of the way it let's you type and select suggestions you can type a fairly long line of code in literally a handful of keypresses, for example, the following line of code, the first I stumbled across after I fired up the IDE:
this.EditorForm.PaintPanel.ChangedCliffTexture += new PaintDockingPanel.CliffTextureChangeHandler(PaintPanel_ChangedCliffTexture);
Can simply be entered with:
this.[enter].[enter].[enter] += [tab]
So, typing this, pressing full stop and enter three times, += then tab and it did all that for me. It basically does 90% of the typing for you and does so so fluidly and seamlessly as you type. This series of characters is much more easy to type than the full line of code, so you're looking at a massive relative time saving for just one line of code - extrapolate that to nearly all lines of code and you get the idea.
A lot of IDEs can't even offer intellisense suggestions quick enough to be useful for fast types (i.e. Eclipse), let alone come close to automatically suggesting the most likely option.
But it's not just that, C#'s support for lambdas, and things like LINQ (to objects, or XML) let you do common tasks with data so quickly and with so little code that not a lot matches it. The.NET framework uses a sensible and consistent set of naming conventions, so knowing what function you may need to perform a particular operation doesn't take much effort - again, zero documentation needed really, chances are intellisense will find list it within a few keypresses - even if you don't know how a function starts, enter a key word in the name and it'll still do a good job of finding it, you don't even have to enter the first letters to get a suggestion which is how some intellisense implementations work in other IDEs.
It's really the combination of C# + Visual Studio + the.NET framework combined that makes you that much more productive. They just fit together so well.
This said, even the language itself has some pretty cool stuff, the C# team have spent a lot of time trying to add in useful language shortcuts. For example, the lock statement which uses the monitor pattern to implement a mutex works as:
lock (someItem) { your code here }
Is a shortcut for:
System.Threading.Monitor.Enter(someItem); try {
your code here } finally {
System.Threading.Monitor.Exit(someItem); }
There are quite a few examples of this.
I haven't worked with Python, but I've done a lot of work with PHP and Zend, Java and Spring, and Ruby on Rails. I'm still far and away more productive with Microsoft's development stack than any of them, even when using Zend's full stack - PHP, Zend Server, and Zend Studio and Spring's Eclipse based IDE etc.
One point I'll note if you do decide to learn C# though, is that whilst learning the basic statements most languages have is easy (for, if, else, blah blah) it is worth taking the next step with C# and learning the more advanced stuff - a book I always recommend once you've got the hang of the basic language is C# in depth. It'll really help you understand how the language has evolved, where it's going, and also where other languages such as Java nowadays are also following.
Slashdot Mirror
What rubbish, an attacker similarly needs to understand every possible attack vector to be able to find a point of entry. They don't just magically happen upon an attack vector and then ignore the system, it takes a lot of time and effort to approach just about all different angles. If they carry out more than one attack in their life time, it's unlikely they'll be able to exploit the exact same vector every time so they'll have to cover many different angles to find ways in.
Unless you're talking about script kiddies who use pre-discovered exploits, but I'm pretty sure that's not what the GP was referring to - he was talking about hackers that actually find methods of entry in the first place, and you cannot do that reliably if you only understand one small part of a system.
The attacker just does not get some big magical arrow over the company pointing to a part of it saying "attack here, this is where an exploit is".
One of the fundamental reasons why attackers are some of the best defenders in security is because to attack, they not only have to be astoundingly competent technically, but have to be extremely good at out thinking of the things no one else has - and that's really key. To attack you genuinely have to be on the cutting edge and be able to consider issues no one else has before. you even mention yourself that the attackers can afford to fail frequently, which has the implication that they'll have to try again - here's a hint, when they fail what do you think they do? they'll have to attempt at another part of the system which they'll then need to understand. Even the script kiddies like Lulzsec had to gain an understanding of the wider system for their HBGary hack which makes a decent case study - their attack involved SQL injection, social engineering, password cracking all of which allowed them to penetrate deeper and deeper.
Just as you've implicitly generalised all attackers as script kiddies who use single pre-discovered attack vectors and nothing more one might equally generalise about the countless "security consultants" working on the defence side of things who think securing a system is about running some pre-written pen testing software and seeing if the UI shows a bunch of ticks and a bunch of crosses, and if it shows any crosses, just installing the latest updates. The point being that that doesn't make you secure against competent attackers - it's the same flawed doctrine that anti-virus software uses, by largely only defending against known threats with a bunch of weak heuristics on top to detect similar threats it completely fails in the face of new threats. The only time I've ever seen AV software find anything in the last 10 - 20 years is when it's already infected the system and too late for the AV software to do anything about it. Much of the defensive security industry is a complete sham in this respect, it's built on a lie that it is somehow going to keep you safe, when in reality it mostly just slows your computer down with it's bloat and gets in your way with it's renewal nag screens.
The problem is that many of the "unhealthy" foods have been done in an even more unhealthy way than necessary.
For example, when schools were serving things like burgers and chips, they were often serving the most cheap, unhealthy burgers they could get their hands on, and similarly providing the most unhealthy of chips.
In the UK, Jamie Oliver's campaign for healthy meals hasn't really helped much, there was a report suggesting a temporary increase in exam performance for some middle class kids, which may well have been the result of something else, but that was the extent of it. Other than that it led to half a million kids no longer eating school meals, and cost the best part of half a billion pounds, whilst doing nothing to stop or slow the increase in childhood obesity.
So as with everything it seems to be about balance, if you go too far to any extreme as we did listening to Jamie Oliver you risk polarising the debate, and pushing many people away from the problem altogether. You still need to provide meals that kids will enjoy like burgers and chips now and again, but you should use good quality meat, cook them in a way that maximises fat drain off and so forth. Similarly, pizza is often demonised but the way they're made fresh in the Med is very different to the packaged garbage that was being served in schools.
The problem with the view of only providing healthy food is that there is a danger that this is taken to the Jamie Oliver extreme of serving food that will push most kids away from the scheme altogether, which led to the rather awful scene of parents pushing unhealthy meals through the school gates to their kids instead. At the end of the day it doesn't matter how healthy your meal is, if kids wont eat it it wont benefit them, the key is to provide food they will eat, but maximise the healthiness of it. If you couple this with other measures like improving the capacity for kids to exercise then the whole thing will be far more effective than the polarising scenario we ended up with here in the UK that was of no net benefit in the long run, and may actually have made things worse whilst costing a lot of money. Whilst it's true that many kids don't like sports either, it's often more a case of offering the right sports, I was never really a fan of field sports myself, but when my school got it's own swimming pool I loved it. Similarly when Tennis became an option, I enjoyed it. I'd wager therefore that whilst some money was needed improving school dinners to some extent, much of the money would've been better spent expanding the amount of exercise kids can opt to do in schools - the schools that offer things as varied as swimming, rugby, football, judo, badminton, tennis do far better in terms of participation than those who tell the kids they've got to get out on the field in barely above zero rainy weather and get muddy playing rugby where the "sick notes" become quote prolific.
So yeah, again, the key is about balance - try to force any extreme and minimise choice and it wont work. I believe "healthier meals" is the key, rather than "healthy meals" which has become a synonym for the things many kids just wont eat.
I don't think I've ever made anyone cry by insulting Jamie Oliver before, I apologise, I didn't realise he had worshippers here on Slashdot.
But for what it's worth, might I just add that if you're going to try and insult someone that you should at very least try and say something that makes at least some kind of sense? Someone who has pointed out that someone who himself is looking a little on the overweight side isn't really in a position to preach about how to live a healthy lifestyle isn't exactly likely to be someone who is themselves overweight.
You see, here is the thing, I eat things like chips, burgers, and chocolate now and again amongst the more healthy stuff, and I'm a perfectly healthy weight, and am perfectly healthy in general, but that's probably because I walk at least 4 miles a day (2 miles as part of my commute, and at least 2 with the dogs on an evening). This is why I at least advocate that the best solution is simply to get a good balance of everything in general rather than focus on one single specific dietary regime that frankly, isn't going to suit, help, or interest everyone. You see, no matter how much you try and bore the kids into shape with Jamie's dinners it's simply not going to solve the weight problem in itself and does more harm than good in putting kids off school meals altogether.
Sorry if the concept that St. Jamie might actually be wrong offends you, but well, there you go, as I say, if St. Jamie really knew better and that his cooking was the only one true way then he wouldn't be struggling to keep a trim healthy figure himself would he?
Of course, this was obvious enough by the fact that despite 8 years having passed, despite half a billion pounds having been spent on Jamie's plan, childhood obesity has continued to increase, and half a million kids less are eating school dinners now than were previously.
But yeah, keep on trolling in defence of Jamie if you want, if that's what makes you feel better about whatever problems you have.
"Well, either the extradition request conforms to the treaty or it doesn't. Since a UK court looked at it and found it legal, whatever Sweden has must be sufficient."
Sure but this doesn't mean it was fair. Like much legislation it seems the extradition treaty was poorly thought through and implemented without a thought as to what happens if it is abused.
This is the same problem we have for example with web snooping laws, it sounds great when politicians promise that it's simply for catching criminals, but it never ends that way does it?
"If the CIA wants to abduct Assange in violation of EU law, they can do that from the UK, they don't have to go to Sweden."
Contrary to the claims that the UK is an American lapdog, it does at least stand up for itself on some such issues. The UK political class is already struggling to justify the extradition of people like Gary McKinnon, adding Assange to the tally would've just ended the current UK-US extradition and blocked any attempt at a similar one. Sweden has in recent years been far more willing to be a US lapdog with the pirate bay raids that turned out to be unjustified under Sweden law, and the later show trial overseen by a judge who was a member of an MPAA affiliated lobby group. The lower courts that decide most trials in the UK are much more independent and generally do a pretty good job, the problem for the likes of the US is that they're not a sure thing, they cannot be guaranteed to do what they want - look at the OiNK case, the decision was fair and just, but it pissed America off no end, hence why we ended up hearing British police telling the FBI along the lines of "we're sorry, we could have done better, we'll do whatever you want from now". Even where British politicians are corrupt, where the newer puppet supreme court which is more easily politically influenced than past courts have been are corrupt, much of the rest of the British judiciary does a damn good job of retaining it's independence.
"And if the US wants to extradite Assange under an extradition agreement with Sweden because he has been indicted in the US, that's legal and I don't have a problem with it. I don't see why you should either."
Well it's really not. Part of the EU extradition treaty is that it has a safeguard stating it cannot be used to extradite to third states. This is really what's key - whether Sweden decides to ignore this or not. I care because it's an affront to justice, if you don't care, then I don't really have much to say to you - I'm not really interested in people who are of the lynch mob mentality, that sort of irrational mindset cannot be reasoned with and belongs to an era long past it's sell by date.
But I get the impression you're not the sort of person who cares about the facts of the case and are simply trying to push the political ideology that seeks revenge for his embarassment of the US and other world governments, so I doubt what I say matters to you.
Personally I don't care what happens to him, but I do care about the continued abuse of the EU-US relations, and poor laws that continue to infringe civil liberties and are a complete affront to justice people like my grandfather fought for. Assange may well be guilty and I could care less if he is, but I want him dealt with fairly, and sensibly. If he's going to be convicted because he's genuinely guilty he needs to be convicted without any doubt. The shenanigans surrounding this case leave more room for doubt that he isn't guilty, than he is, even if a Swedish court finds him such, and that in itself is a problem- because so much subversiveness has taken place in his case he's always going to be innocent to some people, even if he is in fact a rapist, and that stinks as much as anything too. The proper authorities in Sweden should've investigated, the proper authorities in Sweden should've questioned like they questioned anyone else, and the proper authorities should've issued the extradition request as was the intention of the extradition treaty, if not the wordin
The problem is that he hasn't even been charged, extradition for mere questioning is pretty odd.
The most sensible option was to do what Assange's council proposed - the Swedish police question him in person, or via video link in the UK, and if they feel there is enough evidence, then charge him.
The fact it's a prosecutor getting him extradited for questioning with no charges yet filed, and the fact the prosecutor is from a different region to that in which the crimes happened and would hence be normally responsible, and the fact that there is evidence the prosecutor coerced these women into actually filing the charges when they previously weren't interested in doing so is cause for concern that this is politically motivated, that the prosecution know they can't charge him on this due to lack of evidence, but need to get him into the country for a US extradition stitch up - at least, that is what Assange is concerned about.
If they question him, and have enough evidence to charge, then they could simply do it that way and at least give the whole thing a semblance of looking legitimate whether it is or not.
It's not unusual for suspects to be questioned remotely in the country they're in, or by visiting police, so it's a little odd that they're so desperate to avoid that in this case and so desperate to pluck him out the UK with so many obscure procedural quirks that don't normally happen such as the prosecutor issuing the extradition request rather than the police or courts.
The danger is, if he is extradited, the whole thing is dropped because of lack of evidence to actually charge and then they go "Oh, but while you're hear, our friends in the US want a word, so we've booked a flight, it leaves in an hour to take you out of European jurisdiction where you're no longer protected to argue against this kind of illegal rendition...".
To be fair I never got them at school, but please don't tell Jamie Oliver or he'll shit bricks and give the whole nation a lecture again on how it's disgusting that we dare to let children have a choice of what to eat or allow parents to consider letting them eat anything other than Jamie's menu.
All whilst he continues to become even more of a fatso himself, proving the point that it's actually got fuck all to do with whether you eat chips (fries for non-British) now and again or not, because Jamie gets Jamie's immaculately healthy dinners every night but is still getting rather more weighty. It's more about how your metabolism copes with different food, relative to how much exercise you get coupled with the volume and frequency of food you consume. It's not a problem you can simply solve by changing the menus to make them piss fucking boring for most children such that they don't bother to eat a healthy amount at all- it's far more complex than that.
Honestly, I'd rather Gordon Ramsey had been given the role of dealing with the problem of childhood obesity rather than Jamie Oliver because at least Gordon shouting at the kids "Stop eating shit you fat little fuck" would've been an awful lot more amusing if nothing else, but then, that's probably why I wouldn't ever be any good at working with kids.
How many chins are you on now anyway, Jamie?
Well I'm sure if you go down to your local rape crisis centre and say that you'll find no women who disagree, nope, none at all. Anyone who has been involved with rape victims, either because they themselves were raped and went to the crisis centre and met other victims, or simply because they like to help them out will be able to point you to many cases, perhaps even their own.
Seriously, if you hate Assange, that's fine. But don't talk bullshit and trivialise the issue with it simply because you want to try and bolster the view that the decision against Assange was nothing unusual.
The only point you could really bring up that would be valid is that it's usually jury cases that decide this sort of thing, but perhaps there's the problem, that Assange didn't get the benefit of having the case decided by his peers.
See this article, which highlights the problem well and has many parallels to Assange's case:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-422969/Not-guilty-rape-surgeon-slept-women-night.html
Still, I look forward to those citations that prove that there has never been any inconsistency in this sort of thing when you're back at your desk and that all, if not at least the vast majority of such decisions have been the same.
The fundamental issue is that these are different interpretations of the law than those reached in hundreds of other past similar cases, including some far more aggressive than this.
I feel sorry for those girls who have been told by the courts they weren't raped in far less pleasant ordeals than this, yet this, a much more borderline case, is affirmed as rape.
It's frankly disgusting.
Experience isn't born of the amount of time doing something, it's born of how effectively you do something in that time.
When you're making comments that show a dire lack of understanding about the points we're discussing (e.g. mathematical induction as I pointed out) then yes, I'd call that inexperience.
You can't criticise something when you don't have a full picture of it, which, from your comments, you clearly do not.
"My requirements aren't strict. I prefer to use a single stack for development (ranging from something that can be used on an embedded system to a very busy webserver), and that relies on pieces of software that are easy to maintain (such as nginx, apache, etc). As I said before, there are valid reasons to use PHP."
You think PHP is the tool for that wide a range of applications? seriously? I think you really prove the point I made earlier that those who believe PHP is the solution to everything are too inexperienced to understand why it isn't.
"If you believe this, then you have no idea how computers work. And trust isn't a variable, its a property - you either have it, or you don't. If you cannot guarantee that a given test gives you 100% coverage of all use cases, then they cannot be used to assert quality or reliability of the code."
This only further proves the previous point, it seems you don't actually understand what mathematical induction is, because you've glossed over the point about it with some nonsensical tosh that seems to imply that no testing is as good as 99% assurance. That's worrying if you're writing software professionally.
"But hey, facebook too. And Yahoo. And a bunch of other big-ass companies. The "web" part? AFAIK Google relies on a mix of C++ and Python, Facebook relies (mostly) on PHP, and I have no idea what Yahoo uses these days."
Have you even heard of things like JSF? Again you seem to be highlighting your inexperience more than anything.
"Maybe in the future, but not today. And RoR isn't even in the same league."
Why not today? the only reason I can think is hosting availability, other than that they don't perform any worse, but facilitate far better quality software development, with no decrease in speed of development.
"What is so good about delimited paradigms? In the end, it all gets translated to ones an zeros."
Do you even have any concept of the basic principles surrounding good software development such as modularity and separation of concerns? I'm guessing not if you don't understand the importance of paradigms that support the task at hand. This is probably also why you don't understand why PHP's lack of functional support related especially to multi-threading is a very bad thing though.
"That is precisely the problem with Java. The "true way". OOP is not a fit-all solution, and the "Java way" isn't the only way. What you call "forces new developers to make shure" I call indoctrination. It is, without doubt, the "enterprise" language, and - as I said - ubiquous. But it's not a best fit for everything, and it is flawed by design - it assumes that the programmer doesn't know what he wants.I like freedom of implementation."
That's really just a roundabout way of saying "I could never really be arsed to learn to structure programs properly or the benefits of doing so, I prefer to just hack shit together anyway that works without a care of any side effects in terms of poor security, poor code quality, and poor maintainability." I agree OOP isn't the only solution out there, but for most stuff people do it's the best option. This is especially the case when it comes to the web where like 90% of stuff is CRUD which does map extremely well to OO development.
"That is YOUR view on the matter"
Well, mine and just about all other programmers who have a wealth of experience writing respectably sized web applications in a number of different languages such as PHP, Java, and C#.
One only has to look at the vast majority of PHP tutorials out there relating to databases where there are still recommendations to push queries to the DB that are vulnerable to SQL injection to see the scale of the problem.
"Most people aren't really good at anything, and (from my experience) most programmers (regardless of the language) have no clue about how software actually works, or how different paradigms are implemented. Is that relevant? No. The notion of language "purity" is pedantic."
Perhaps again this stems
"Please do tell, what scripting/dynamic language can I use that is multiplatform, has a rich library of modules, runs well as CGI and has an apache module available, can be run from CLI easily, has at least equivalent PHP performance, can be used for OOP or procedural programming, and isn't Python or Perl? Because you sound like there's a ton of choices available."
Well, if you ensure your requirements are that strict and eliminate the alternatives then yes, you wont find anything other than PHP. But in the real world the requirements are rarely ever quite that strict, and there'd be no logical reason to arbitrarily just eliminate the alternatives.
"I do understand what you are saying, but if you were a C programmer, there would also be literally hundreds of extremely subtle issues that can cause real bugs, that wouldn't be catched at compile time. Shure, most of those issues aren't clearly defects of the language (and most PHP ones are), but the result is the same - silent failure."
No there aren't, that's precisely the point. Pretty much everything that can trip you up in something like C is well known and is there as part of a design decision, the same can't be said for PHP, it's issues are far more numerous, far more subtle, and aren't there as any coherent design decision - they're there by accident, they're poorly documented, and most prominently, they're far, far more numerous, and that's the issue. You expect quirks in every language but PHP's are more serious, more numerous, and more subtle.
"1) TDD is mostly useless because the testcases cannot cover the entire range of values and options (execution paths) of the code being tested;"
If you're building bad tests sure, but you shouldn't need to test the full range of variables, if you have even a basic understanding of the concept of mathematical induction it should be trivial to build a fairly safe test case that covers the most important, often small set of inputs required to give a good degree of trust in code. As the PHP developers don't even understand the far more basic concepts of transitivity though, I'm not suprised they struggle with this. It's also worth noting that TDD isn't going to be much help if you just ignore the test results and ship anyway without fixing problems, even when your code doesn't pass it's own tests, which is precisely what the PHP folks did - shipped code that failed to pass it's own unit tests.
"2) most of the quirks of PHP can be worked around (as somewhat proved by the ton of functional applications available)"
If you're aware of them, which 99% of PHP developers aren't. The functional applications argument is a bit of a weak argument, because it ignores the many bugs that haven't been discovered, and the fact that PHP applications are far and away the most hacked and exploited nowadays. Yes, there's plenty of stuff out there that just about works, but that's the stuff that has managed to make it through, it doesn't of course factor in all the applications where they gave up on PHP, where they ported to something else, and it ignores the massive disparity of security exploits against apps built in PHP compared to those built in say Java.
"What kind of evidence do you want? Try to load a webpage made for Netscape 6.0 that uses Javascript on a modern browser. Show me a CMS available since 2002 that hasn't been rewritten at least once, and still works well. Go ahead, and try to run an ASP application from 2002 on a modern computer. Or Java web application. Or even a Python one."
You can say the same about desktop software, if you haven't noticed things like Visual Studio, Microsoft office etc. get updated every couple of years, sometimes with major rewrites (i.e. Visual Studio 2010 switching to WPF for it's UI). There are similarly examples of web sites that have been running since the early days of the web with nothing more than updates throughout their life - Amazon has been around since 1994, IMDB since 94, eBay since 95. The web just isn't old enough to have the number o
Yes, I think to put your point more simply, the thing about Turing is that he was one of the 20th centuries mathematical greats.
Like Fermat in the 17th century, Newton in the 17th/18th century, etc. people like Godel and Turing were the equivalent mathematical greats of the 20th century, and because their contributions are so relatively recent, the ripples of the effect of their work are still being felt to this day.
In another hundred or two hundred years, Turing's name will be listed alongside everyone from Archimedes, to Fermat, to Newton, and so on, as a mathematician, his work was simply that important to humanity.
"PHP is used for one thing and one thing only - to generate CGI-like applications that shit webpages. If you are using it for anything else, you are using it wrong. If you have strange/complex requirements, or need to scale horizontally, you are using it wrong. If you need a stateful environment (where threads usually make sense for some tasks), you are using it wrong. If you need a GUI, you are using it wrong. Etc etc."
I don't disagree, but the point is other technologies do all that and do it better, so again, why bother PHP?
"but bad PHP code is usually easy to spot"
If you believe this, I suspect you're one of those people who doesn't actually understand why PHP is bad. One of the biggest problems with PHP is that it has literally hundreds of extremely subtle issues that can cause real bugs (e.g. reversed ternary operator chaining). These issues aren't simple to spot, no matter how good you think you are, and this is really the fundamental problem.
"Can't say the same for Python or Java. And the quirks."
Absolutely you can, because they don't have these hundreds of quirks that PHP has, not to mention that Java wont even compile some of the things that PHP will silenty fail on.
"Because the application is basicly re-initialized from scratch each time it is run, you want it to exit as soon as possible"
Er, that's the whole point of threading - if you want something to happen in the background, you can throw it off in a thread, and respond to the client without having to wait for that processing to finish. This ironically means you can't exit as soon as possible and respond to the client in some cases, you have to wait for processing to end, even if that processing isn't necessary for the client to receive their response.
"There were some projects in the past that tried to implement thread support and failed - mostly, due to the fact that most libraries that PHP uses weren't threaded, and general lack of interest. "
Lack of interest being because anyone needing it just ended up using a proper language, like Java, instead, not because it's unnecessary.
"I personally hate Python. I cannot use a language that treats me like a child. But yes, Python can be used in a plethora of cases where PHP is a bad idea - but, if I'm using Python, why not use anything else?"
I agree, I don't like Python either, but the point is that if you have Python as an option, then PHP is always a bad idea, because even for the small niche areas where you can just about get away with PHP, Python does it better, as does for example, RoR.
"The same argument can be applied to any language. PHP (with a decent framework) is quite usable, easy to learn/troubleshoot (despite of the quirks), and delivers."
Again, if you believe this, then I'm not convinced you're aware of PHP's many subtle issues. They are well documented, most recently, and probably most extensively here:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
"Web-based applications tipically have a (much) shorter lifespan than desktop applications, so even the long-run cost of "maintenance" isn't a real problem."
Do you have any evidence to back this up? The only reason I can see it being true is that the web hasn't been around as long as the desktop, there's no evidence that I'm aware of that web applications get taken down and replaced quicker than desktop applications.
The problem is that your argument seems to be weighted entirely on the rather weak get out clause that if PHP has failed then someone is doing it wrong. Therein lies the fundamental problem, it means anyone using PHP is always doing it wrong, because relative to use other options, PHP is always a failure - it's always inherently more buggy, slower to develop with, poorer performing, harder to maintain or a mix of those issues than just using an alternative technology would be, so again, what redeeming features does PHP have that make it better than any of the alternatives like Python or RoR, or even something JIT'd like C# or Java?
Yes, the problem is when double standards are used.
The government went against their excuse quoted by the GP in pardoning long dead World War I soldiers who were convicted of cowardice.
This has the implication that government believes some past crimes (homosexuality) don't deserve pardons, but others (cowardice) do.
The reality is many Tory MPs are still homophobic bigots, as we're seeing to be the case now that gay marriage has come up and the Tories are the biggest potential barrier to it, so to pardon Turing would've upset many of the Tory backbench, whilst pardoning a bunch of people who were equally legitimately convicted under the rules at the time for cowardice is a populist move to make a bunch of whiners who aren't even old enough to have known their ancestors tried for cowardice shut the fuck up is acceptable.
So the excuse is just "blah blah blah bullshit", the real reason is still political, whether you feel it's the right thing to do or not, your feeling on whether pardons should or shouldn't be given is not the actual reason a pardon was not given unfortunately. As you're no doubt aware, rationality is rarely ever the purpose for doing anything in politics.
Yes but that's not what the GP was saying.
There's no doubt Turing was persecuted, and no doubt he was a genius, but he wasn't persecuted because he was a genius that's the point.
The term "persecuted genius" is related to the idea of someone being persecuted because they had ideas that were ahead of their time, but were offensive, to say, the church, and so were persecuted for those ideas, even though those ideas were factually correct.
Gallileo is the obvious example, he figured out that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than the prominent and rather arrogant view at the time that the entire universe revolved around Earth (and to some degree, everything in the universe revolved around mankind). The Vatican rather hated this view and eventually forced him to spend the rest of his life under house arrest for it.
There was no problem with the ideas Turing put forth, no one was persecuting him for his groundbreaking work in maths and computing, rather they were persecuting him for his sexual orientation. In other words, rather than the term "persecuted genius" which has a specific meaning and background to it, it's probably better to say that he was a genius, that was persecuted.
For what it's worth I have a Dell sitting around somewhere that's 15.4" and 1900x1200, so you didn't even have to go up to 17" for that previously.
I've not looked at the market in a while, presumably it's not improved and getting a 15" laptop with anything close to this resolution is still now impossible giving the appearance that the technology magically doesn't exist to squeeze this many pixels onto a laptop screen even though we used to have it?
"Actually, Argentina's claim helps the British politicians to bolster nationalism and that way getting support."
I'm not sure this is true, if only because the Falklands issue never comes up on British politician's timetables. The recent Falklands tensions for example came up when Britain's government was fairly fresh and new, and still largely in it's honeymoon period, and still rating very highly in the polls. Why would they care to use it when they're not even struggling?
I don't deny it helps them when it is brought up, and if they are unpopular, but they're certainly not the ones dictating the timing - Argentina is and whilst yes, it may be used more internally, it's hard for Britain to not answers attempts at involving the international community at the UN because at that point it really has to answer, besides it's response is always just "We're not going to discuss it unless the islanders want it discussed" so it's not as if they really ratchet up the rhetoric.
I think the British government does want it solved, because it's costly for us to maintain a military prescence down there as a precautionary force, I think our government would love to not have to do that. Similarly I think even past Argentinian administrations have wanted it solved, there was progress to that in the 90s where Argentina was happy to accept our sovereignty over the islands, as long as they got preferential treatment when it came to any oil exploration etc. but again the Argentinian's pulled out when their economy started to run into trouble and things got tough politically. I'd agree with you if we were bringing up the issue, and we were doing so when our governments were struggling politically, but the timing just doesn't match the theory.
Perhaps the thing that saddens me the most is that Argentina is such a beautiful country, with so much potential, yet it continues to elect the most politically inept people possible that ruin things for not just Argentinians, but people like us who would rather not have to deal with the bullshit too, and even the Brazilians, Chileans, etc. are getting a bit concerned at how crazy the Kirchner administration is now getting beginning to follow the line of some of the worlds biggest kooks like Chavez and getting friendly with Ahmadinejad, when they've got some perfectly sane, perfectly competent neighbours right next door whom they'd be better off aligning and working with.
I hope one day Argentina just focusses on it's own self improvement, that relations can improve. Making it easier for British people to get to the Falklands isn't ever going to help their claim, but it'd sure as hell help their prospects of joining in the exploiting of oil/gas resources around the islands, and it'd sure as hell boost British, and even European tourism to Argentina and the islands. There's so much scope for things to be so much better, but Argentina first needs to sort it's political class the fuck out. Our politicians are pretty bad, but they're not Kirchner/Chavez/Ahmadinejad bad, and that's the problem. Argentina really should follow Brazil's lead where Brazil's political class are far from puppets of the West and are very independently minded, but aren't so irrational that they think it's a good idea to get in bed with the likes of Chavez either. With a stronger Argentina, South America as a whole could become so much more important a voice, and so much more beneficial to the world as a whole on the world stage as another independent grouping of countries that could bring a counter balancing viewpoint to both the EU/America, Russia, and China. South American states for example do a fantastic job of pushing for greater marine protection in the Atlantic and Western Pacific.
The irony is also, that if Argentina was a strong, progressive, modern nation, the Falkland islanders may then decide themselves to either go independent from Britain with closer links to Argentina, or pass under Argentinian leadership without all this drama in the middle, and at that point, even if the British
There were native Georgians in South Ossetia being expelled by Russians and separatists, as well as the territory being used to attack Georgia proper, that's the problem.
This is in stark contrast to the Falklands where there is no native Argentinian population and where they hasn't really been any number of settled Argentinians in almost 200 years, and where the only aggression surrounding the islands has repeatedly come from Argentina, militarily in '82, and economically in terms of blockades now.
"Well, I'm one of the guys that usually counter-arguments on the "PHP is evil" rants, and I create code professionally, so I guess I'm a "professional" programmer. I've never seen a PHP programmer saying it is a well designed language - on the contrary. Anyone that actually uses PHP knows it is an half-assed attempt at nothing, riddled with inconsistencies and unexpected behaviours. I probably could point out some serious problems with "acceptable" languages such as C, or inconsistencies in a language that is the "elefant in the room" (Javascript), but the list of defects of those languages combined probably isn't remotely close to the problems PHP has.
That said, there are areas where PHP shines - and, while there are alternatives - PHP still is a viable choice. As a programmer, I like how it does not force a paradigm down my throat, and gives me the liberty to freely implement how I choose to. I wouldn't use it for GUI programming (I know, someone else thought it was a good idea), or for complex database handling, and yes, the internet is full of piss-poor PHP code, but know what else? You have piss-poor JAVA code too. And C. And python. And every other language you can think of."
I agree with much of what you say, but your only counter argument is simply that there are problems with other languages, and code in other languages too.
Yes, that's absolutely true, but as you say yourself the problems in languages don't even come close in number, nor in seriousness of defects. I don't like the fact C# has shortcut property initialisers which don't also make it trivial to instantiate properties at declaration like you can variables meaning you lose that benefit. I also don't like that Java doesn't have operator overloading. But you know what? all that pales to the fact that PHP outright just doesn't even support multi-threading for crying out loud. A fundamentally important concept in modern computing and most certainly in scalable web apps and it just doesn't even support it.
The fact you get bad code in every language doesn't excuse the fact that you inherently get more bad code in PHP because there are just so many language pitfalls that 99% of PHP developers aren't even aware of but will without question eventually stumble over without realising it. It doesn't change the fact that interpreted languages are inherently more prone to errors for the most part because there is no compile time error checking that force you fix at least some of the most obvious bugs or the app wont even try to run. So yes, other languages have bad code, but in PHP it's inherently far far worse a problem, and unnecessarily so beyond the fact the language is abysmally designed.
"If you need parallel programming, PHP (and VB6 :D) is not an acceptable choice. If what you meant was lack of thread support, well, I'd say threads - while valid in some contexts - are overused and often create more problems than they solve."
Right, but that's not an excuse for not having them, because it means that if you don't even have them, then where it is the right solution to the problem, they don't even exist, meaning PHP fundamentally outright prevents you implementing the correct solution to some problems.
"As you said "anyone with even a basic understanding if computer science" can work around them in many (most?) cases."
The problem is that the workaround is often too costly. It involves the sort of things Facebook has had to do - throwing far more money at data centers than necessary if it was developed with more suitable technology from the outset, writing your own PHP to C++ translator to try and work around it, writing your own Java-esque PHP VM also. There's the problem right there - at that point, you might as well just use something else.
So this really highlights the problem with your argument, your argument is that PHP can do stuff, well yeah it can, sure, but the problem is it doesn't do stuff better than anything else. It's not as well designed an interpreted language as Python
"1. AFAIK Argentina never "accepted British sovereignty""
It wasn't Argentina's to accept. Argentina didn't exist as it does now at the time Britain claimed sovereignty.
"2. The current government of Argentina was elected in 2011 with more than 50% of the votes. I'd be cautious about calling that 'political incompetence'."
There are many examples of politicians getting elected with a strong voter base, it doesn't mean they were in any way competent leaders though. That is after all the fundamental problem with populism - it plays to people's most basic instincts and attracts large support, but it's ultimately detrimental to a country. I'd call your country being in a complete shit state despite having all the benefits of thriving nations like Brazil available for you to exploit political incompetence for sure. An obvious example is George Bush, he got voted in with over 50% of the votes also, but he also managed to do more damage to America's standing in the world, and America's wealth than any other president has done for many decades. Getting voted in doesn't make you politically competent, running a country well to improve your citizens standards of living makes you political competent. Successive Argentinian governments who also bring up the Falklands claim have completely and utterly failed to achieve this, whilst those that have achieved it, never seem too bothered about the Falklands, funny that.
"3. "On 2 January 1833, Captain James Onslow, of the brig-sloop HMS Clio, arrived at the Spanish settlement at Port Louis to request that the Argentine flag be replaced with the British one, and for the Argentine administration to leave the islands."
I'd hardly qualify this as 'settling legitimately', but YMMV"
Right. It's just a shame you didn't paste that in the context of the rest of the Wikipedia article and only read what you wanted to. Here, let me help:
"The British first landed on the Falklands in 1690, when Captain John Strong sailed through Falkland Sound, naming this passage of water after Anthony Cary, 5th Viscount of Falkland, the First Lord of the Admiralty at that time. The British were keen to settle the islands, as they had the potential to be a strategic naval base for passage around Cape Horn.[7] In 1765, Captain John Byron landed on Saunders Island. He then explored other islands' coasts and claimed the group for Britain. The following year, Captain John MacBride returned to Port Egmont, on Saunders, to construct a fort. The British later discovered the French colony at Port Saint Louis, and the first sovereignty dispute began."
Britain was there first with the French, Port Saint Louis was created by France. France nowadays supports the British claim.
"The Spanish expelled the British colony in 1770, but it was restored in 1771 following British threats of war over the islands."
Spain later kicked the British colony that was there first out, but let it back in when Britain threatened war.
"By 1776, the British had left their settlement, leaving behind a plaque asserting British sovereignty over the islands."
Britain pulled out because it needed it's forces for the American revolution, but retained it's claim. British fishermen, whalers etc. continued to visit and use the island. It later resettled there in 1831.
So yes, the small out of context snippet you posted sounds a bit off, but that's what happens when you remove context. Britain requesting peaceful removal of an Argentine flag from territory which it had claimed almost 150 years previously and maintained a settlement and sovereignty claim on, with the Spanish settlement on which Argentina bases it's claim only arriving 80 years later causing the only ambiguity in ownership with a very short forceful 1 year removal of the British settlement since the initial anglo-French dispute before continued British sovereignty kind of rips your "I'd hardly qualify this as 'settling legitimately', but YMMV" comment apart.
If finding some fucking islands in the first place
"The malvinas/falklands issue goes waaaaaay back, centuries back."
Hardly. Argentina issued initial disputes up until 1849 and once in 1885, but then accepted British sovereignty. It was only in 1941 that Argentina decided to bring it up again because as it does now, and as it did in '82 it had a weak government that desperately needed to stir nationalist sentiment to try and bolster it's standing and the Falklands is an easy target. It's really no coincidence that the issue only ever comes up again each time Argentina has a government that's managed to completely fuck up the country through political incompetence.
"But anyway, why does england claim a couple of islands on the other fucking side of the world and nobody thinks that's strange?"
Because it's been inhabited by British people since the 1640s with only a couple of breaks hundreds of years ago?
You could similarly ask why Alaska isn't Russian or Canadian when it's geographically closer to those nations than it is the US.
There's a number of ways to determine the nationality of a nation and geographical proximity is only one of these, others include who got there first, what the population wants, who won it militarily and the fact of the matter is that Britain wins out hands down in all of these - it's questionable whether the British or French got there first, but the French support the British claim regardless, the British have clearly won it militarily when Argentina tried that tactic, and the population is British, and has been for hundreds of years.
Fundamentally though, the United Nation's key point in terms of determining sovereignty is the will of the people living there. This is important, because no one should have to be ruled against their will, and whilst it does get abused (i.e. Russia pushing pro-Georgian people out of Georgian breakaway regions whilst making pro-Russian people Russian citizens to claim the will of the people) it is for the most part the most sensible option. It's also not as if Britain annexed it by pushing out an Argentine population, the British population has been there as long as any (including when the Spanish were there), the Spanish left, Argentina tried to settle elsewhere there on the island but with no British interference failed to do so because they were not prepared for the harsh weather and so gave up and left it.
The fact is the people living there are living their legitimately, their ancestors settled their legitimately, and they did not use any kind of force to push anyone else out. Everyone else that settled/tried to settle left of their own accord. So if the population is there legitimately, and the population wants to be British the case is pretty clear cut - Argentina just doesn't have an argument.
Again, Argentina's claim is about absolutely nothing more than bolstering a weak incompetent government with the time tested tactics of winning over the ignorant amongst society by using nationalism and populism.
It's also worth noting that Britain even offered to work with Argentina on oil exploration etc. around the islands in the late 90s to at least try and improve relations which it did not have to do, but the Argentine government at the time, again, having fucked up the economy, decided it needed to ramp up the populist rhetoric and pulled out going on about sovereignty.
Again, Argentina's arguments would have far more merit if it weren't for the fact that any claims continuously coincide with bad governance and decreasing popularity of the party in government at the time. When Argentinian governments have been doing well in the polls, they've not even brought up the issue, and have even sought to improve relationships, but every time an Argentinian government starts to struggle, it brings it up. It's pathetic.
Yes, well, a lot of so-called "professional" programmers believe PHP is a well designed language, and a good number of them exist on Slashdot.
The problem is that the bar isn't exactly high to be able to call yourself a professional programmer.
A decade or so ago you had to understand things like pointers and so forth, nowadays you can knock together any crock of shit and call yourself a professional programmer. I suppose that's good and bad - good in that humanity gets more software ideas turned into reality, bad in that some of those "professional programmers" go on to be the developers responsible for password security at LinkedIn.
I'm sure I'll get some replies telling me I'm wrong, and that PHP is actually the most awesome thing to have ever arisen, but the poor sods telling me that are somewhat ironically hence going to be the same people I'm talking about. I've been using PHP on a large 18 month project now (and thank fuck it's finally almost over, though I suspect we'll get some uplift work) and if you can't tell what's wrong with it, you really prove my point - to anyone with even a basic understanding of computer science and/or has some experience in producing systems in other mainstream languages it's all quite obvious. Perhaps the most glaring one in this day and age is the complete and utter lack of actual parallel programming support beyond a few awful curl hack libraries.
Really, VB6 is the same thing, different market - the advantage VB6 has is that because it's not generally web facing like PHP the faults that arise from the poor software it allows rarely become a big deal, so it keeps chugging along meaning that yes, exactly as you say, it lets people do what people need to do where there is no professional development resource available to do it, and rarely causes any harm, so I don't really have too much of a problem with it. Ultimately the problems with these sorts of language arise when the program either grows well beyond it's means, or are exposed to the wider world, or the developer behind them gets a bit too ambitious relative to their skillset or the strength of their tools, but if all that's never going to happen I don't think they're necessarily a bad thing.
Despite my comments, I'm not really much of a language bigot, if it works for you then go for it, but with the caveat that you're aware of where problems could arise from your chosen toolset - the problem is with the likes of 99% of PHP developers, and even a good number of developers in general is that they don't have that awareness, whereas the salesperson you mention hacking together their VB6 app, again, somewhat ironically, does.
This got modded informative? Look, it's nothing against you adosch, you're obviously trying to be helpful, but your post is very low quality, and if mods think it's informative it really shows how far Slashdot has fallen.
It sounds like you don't really have much experience in web application development, as those suggestions you put forward simply aren't viable if you want any degree of flexibility. Joomla for example is brutally inflexible, and painful bloated and slow. The real problem is though that you believe Java is somehow similar to Javascript, jQuery is a Javascript library, and Javascript is about as similar to Java, as Afghanistan is to America in terms of culture. They really couldn't be much more different, curly braces is about the only thing they share.
"And NetBeans, and every other IDE that works well with big PHP projects is wrong, because Eclipse can't be a big pile of poo?"
I've been working on a large PHP project in NetBeans for about 18 months now, and by works well I'm assuming you mean "Is only a tiny bit better than just using a text editor with syntax highlighting like Notepad++" ?
Honestly, if PHP and NetBeans is working well then I think it shows the low standards PHP developers have and expect. Compared to something like XCode, JDeveloper, and Visual Studio it's still piss poor. It's not NetBeans fault though, it's simply doing the best it can with a bad language.
Honestly part the reason C# is so quick to develop with and so much more so than other environments is because of Visual Studio. The IDE's intellisense is so many years ahead of anything else there's just little contest. It seems to match intellisense suggestions based on not just the text you type, but possible types of suggestion that are relevant to the context you're typing, so if you type say:
int i = user.
Then after the dot it'll suggest any properties of user that are integers first and foremost for example, but also will consider recently used properties within the same scope etc. - this is an extremely simple answer, when you're working with a more complex line of code it really shines, effectively because of the way it let's you type and select suggestions you can type a fairly long line of code in literally a handful of keypresses, for example, the following line of code, the first I stumbled across after I fired up the IDE:
this.EditorForm.PaintPanel.ChangedCliffTexture += new PaintDockingPanel.CliffTextureChangeHandler(PaintPanel_ChangedCliffTexture);
Can simply be entered with:
this.[enter].[enter].[enter] += [tab]
So, typing this, pressing full stop and enter three times, += then tab and it did all that for me. It basically does 90% of the typing for you and does so so fluidly and seamlessly as you type. This series of characters is much more easy to type than the full line of code, so you're looking at a massive relative time saving for just one line of code - extrapolate that to nearly all lines of code and you get the idea.
A lot of IDEs can't even offer intellisense suggestions quick enough to be useful for fast types (i.e. Eclipse), let alone come close to automatically suggesting the most likely option.
But it's not just that, C#'s support for lambdas, and things like LINQ (to objects, or XML) let you do common tasks with data so quickly and with so little code that not a lot matches it. The .NET framework uses a sensible and consistent set of naming conventions, so knowing what function you may need to perform a particular operation doesn't take much effort - again, zero documentation needed really, chances are intellisense will find list it within a few keypresses - even if you don't know how a function starts, enter a key word in the name and it'll still do a good job of finding it, you don't even have to enter the first letters to get a suggestion which is how some intellisense implementations work in other IDEs.
It's really the combination of C# + Visual Studio + the .NET framework combined that makes you that much more productive. They just fit together so well.
This said, even the language itself has some pretty cool stuff, the C# team have spent a lot of time trying to add in useful language shortcuts. For example, the lock statement which uses the monitor pattern to implement a mutex works as:
lock (someItem) { your code here }
Is a shortcut for:
System.Threading.Monitor.Enter(someItem);
try {
your code here
}
finally {
System.Threading.Monitor.Exit(someItem);
}
There are quite a few examples of this.
I haven't worked with Python, but I've done a lot of work with PHP and Zend, Java and Spring, and Ruby on Rails. I'm still far and away more productive with Microsoft's development stack than any of them, even when using Zend's full stack - PHP, Zend Server, and Zend Studio and Spring's Eclipse based IDE etc.
One point I'll note if you do decide to learn C# though, is that whilst learning the basic statements most languages have is easy (for, if, else, blah blah) it is worth taking the next step with C# and learning the more advanced stuff - a book I always recommend once you've got the hang of the basic language is C# in depth. It'll really help you understand how the language has evolved, where it's going, and also where other languages such as Java nowadays are also following.