information from blogs and personal web pages is trivial and can't be trusted, and on the other hand the information is so important that it can ruin a person's life.
The fact that the "information" on the page in question is false demonstrates pretty well why personal web pages can't be trusted as objective sources of accurate information. The fact that enough people believe the "information" that the assistant principal has been harassed by people she doesn't know demonstrates pretty well that it can ruin a person's life.
By suing someone for defamation of character over a personal web page, this person is legitimising the information on personal web sites
Ummm, no... this person is openly saying the "information" is not true. Factual inaccuracy is often a pretty big part of libel cases.
The difference is in the truthfulness (not truthiness) of the statements. If you complain about bad service at a restaurant, there's no good way to define "bad service", so it would be hard to show that the statements are false. On the other hand, if you said that the restaurant had cockroaches in the kitchen, you could be sued for libel (unless of course it's true). For the bully example, of course you can't be sued, since what you're saying is true. In the case being discussed here, though, the statements being made were known by the kids making the page to be false. This case also has the added feature that the kids were pretending to actually be the person they were talking about. In a libel case, there's probably going to be a big difference between "the assistant principal is a lesbian" and "I'm the assistant principal. I'm a lesbian."
This is one of the things that annoys most serious PHP developers. phpBB is probably the worst, most insecure piece of code (and I use the term "code" loosely) written in the past 20 years. phpBB has at least one new security hole every week. phpBB is to PHP as Windows is to operating systems, so it's not really fair to judge PHP itself and any code written it based on experience with phpBB. It would be analogous to saying Linux and BSD are insecure because Windows is; they are all operating systems (probably mostly written in C).
Just to clarify, I think you meant "executing" instead of "parsing". If there's a parse error in the file, none of it is ever executed, including any execution-time changes you make to PHP's error handling.
Your example is also a terrible use of error suppression. Most of the time's I've seen people use @ for error suppression have been because the programmer is too lazy, stupid, or ignorant to check for expected failures. In your example, using file_exists() before trying to include the file would be much better, since you won't end up with problems that are difficult to find because you've hidden the error message. The only legitimate uses for error suppression I've found are for functions that generate error messages even on expected failures, with no possibility of knowing ahead of time that the function will fail (socket connection timing out is the first example that comes to mind).
I don't know what country you're from, but in the United States, a "minor" is defined as under 18 years old. According to the stories (assuming the media can get at least this one fact right), the sexual communications Foley sent were to a boy that was 15 at the time.
At which point your theory is no longer "God exists", but "God exists and will stop a black hole generator from destroying Earth". If we create a black hole generator and God stops it, congratulations on providing evidence that God exists. However, if God doesn't stop the black hole generator, you've only disproven that God will stop a black hole generator from destroying Earth, not that God exists.
You don't even have to leave the United States to get an accurate analogy. Just replace "Year 200x" with "Year 195x", "terrorist" with "communist", and "Bush and friends" with "McCarthy and friends." The phrase "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" comes to mind.
At least in my area, Comcast doesn't block any ports. It's the only reason I have them instead of Verizon (well, that and Verizon's tech support insisted that they don't block any ports).
Actually, if I remember correctly, Israel is constitutionally a theocracy, at least as far as Israeli law being based on traditional Jewish law. Fortunately, since Judaism was more of a society and culture before it became a religion, Jewish law contains a pretty large amount of non-religious (i.e. criminal and civil) law, so Israeli theocracy doesn't become a religious tyranny.
The hardware to do this exists. I got to play around with this stuff a little bit in school. If I remember correctly, the extra components were a relatively high-end video card and monitor (needs to be able to push 120 Hz to get a scene at 60 Hz), a special polarized screen to go over the monitor, and special polarized glasses. It works by alternating the images you would normally see with your left eye and right eye, which the screen and glasses make visible only to the appropiate eye. I think the hardware we had cost a total of $2500 US, so it's not quite average-household cheap, but it's affordable enough for businesses or schools that could use it. For more (and better) information, check some of the pages listed on Google
The Temple of Fiends was insane. I usually had to go through it several times to gain about 6 levels before I could make it all the way through. I have to say, though, that Chaos was kind of a pansy. If you have a Black Belt/Master in your party, have your Black Wizard cast Fast on him. He'll easily do 800-900 damage per attack. Combined with the extra 500 or so damage from your other attackers (For me, usually a Knight with a normal attack and a White Wizard with Fade), it's enough to kill Chaos in 2 rounds. If you want an example of a tough final boss, go with Zeromus. Even if you spend many hours getting your characters up to level 70, Big Bang does some pretty heavy damage.
The real problem with stuff like this is that it never works out in practice as well as it sounds in theory. The old saying "you have nothing to hide if you haven't done anything wrong" is 100% true. Unfortunately, the definition of "wrong" can be changed by those in power. 10 years from now, criticizing the president could be deemed "wrong", at which point all of us that have disagreed with the administration will have plenty to hide.
If the government doesn't abuse the power given to it by the citizens...
A competent, non-abusive government is an absolutely wonderful thing. Now we just have to find one.
That's far too complicated for me. I'm originally from Maine, where all we had was a big sheet of paper with a list of names and a broken arrow next to each name (- >). Each voting booth had a table and a marker, and you'd fill in the arrow next to the name you wanted to vote for (so it became -->). I haven't voted in any other states yet (I moved to Massachusetts this past year), but I'm somewhat scared about how much more complicated places can make voting than what Maine did.
Isn't it a little tempting to read the Python version as s = "first option"? Might be just me, though.
It's not just you. It's the same reason I don't like Perl's $foo = "bar" if $blah syntax. It reads as Set $foo to "bar"... Oh wait, never mind, don't do what I just told you to do. I would personally prefer the condition-true-false order, since it matches the full if-else structure. I don't really mind the ?: symbols, but I wouldn't lose any sleep if a language picked different symbols.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is in the truthfulness (not truthiness) of the statements. If you complain about bad service at a restaurant, there's no good way to define "bad service", so it would be hard to show that the statements are false. On the other hand, if you said that the restaurant had cockroaches in the kitchen, you could be sued for libel (unless of course it's true). For the bully example, of course you can't be sued, since what you're saying is true. In the case being discussed here, though, the statements being made were known by the kids making the page to be false. This case also has the added feature that the kids were pretending to actually be the person they were talking about. In a libel case, there's probably going to be a big difference between "the assistant principal is a lesbian" and "I'm the assistant principal. I'm a lesbian."
This is one of the things that annoys most serious PHP developers. phpBB is probably the worst, most insecure piece of code (and I use the term "code" loosely) written in the past 20 years. phpBB has at least one new security hole every week. phpBB is to PHP as Windows is to operating systems, so it's not really fair to judge PHP itself and any code written it based on experience with phpBB. It would be analogous to saying Linux and BSD are insecure because Windows is; they are all operating systems (probably mostly written in C).
You're exactly right, PHP hasn't had anything that does prepared statements for several years
Close enough.
Just to clarify, I think you meant "executing" instead of "parsing". If there's a parse error in the file, none of it is ever executed, including any execution-time changes you make to PHP's error handling. Your example is also a terrible use of error suppression. Most of the time's I've seen people use @ for error suppression have been because the programmer is too lazy, stupid, or ignorant to check for expected failures. In your example, using file_exists() before trying to include the file would be much better, since you won't end up with problems that are difficult to find because you've hidden the error message. The only legitimate uses for error suppression I've found are for functions that generate error messages even on expected failures, with no possibility of knowing ahead of time that the function will fail (socket connection timing out is the first example that comes to mind).
I don't know what country you're from, but in the United States, a "minor" is defined as under 18 years old. According to the stories (assuming the media can get at least this one fact right), the sexual communications Foley sent were to a boy that was 15 at the time.
That plan sounds really familiar. Where have I heard that before...
Oh yeah, 1999.
At which point your theory is no longer "God exists", but "God exists and will stop a black hole generator from destroying Earth". If we create a black hole generator and God stops it, congratulations on providing evidence that God exists. However, if God doesn't stop the black hole generator, you've only disproven that God will stop a black hole generator from destroying Earth, not that God exists.
You don't even have to leave the United States to get an accurate analogy. Just replace "Year 200x" with "Year 195x", "terrorist" with "communist", and "Bush and friends" with "McCarthy and friends." The phrase "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" comes to mind.
At least in my area, Comcast doesn't block any ports. It's the only reason I have them instead of Verizon (well, that and Verizon's tech support insisted that they don't block any ports).
Actually, if I remember correctly, Israel is constitutionally a theocracy, at least as far as Israeli law being based on traditional Jewish law. Fortunately, since Judaism was more of a society and culture before it became a religion, Jewish law contains a pretty large amount of non-religious (i.e. criminal and civil) law, so Israeli theocracy doesn't become a religious tyranny.
The hardware to do this exists. I got to play around with this stuff a little bit in school. If I remember correctly, the extra components were a relatively high-end video card and monitor (needs to be able to push 120 Hz to get a scene at 60 Hz), a special polarized screen to go over the monitor, and special polarized glasses. It works by alternating the images you would normally see with your left eye and right eye, which the screen and glasses make visible only to the appropiate eye. I think the hardware we had cost a total of $2500 US, so it's not quite average-household cheap, but it's affordable enough for businesses or schools that could use it. For more (and better) information, check some of the pages listed on Google
The Temple of Fiends was insane. I usually had to go through it several times to gain about 6 levels before I could make it all the way through. I have to say, though, that Chaos was kind of a pansy. If you have a Black Belt/Master in your party, have your Black Wizard cast Fast on him. He'll easily do 800-900 damage per attack. Combined with the extra 500 or so damage from your other attackers (For me, usually a Knight with a normal attack and a White Wizard with Fade), it's enough to kill Chaos in 2 rounds. If you want an example of a tough final boss, go with Zeromus. Even if you spend many hours getting your characters up to level 70, Big Bang does some pretty heavy damage.
Yeah, that's because, unlike the pop bands of today, those bands don't suck.
</futile attempt at being half funny>
This seems like as good a place as any to add this obligatory quote. I knew it, I'm surrounded by Assholes.
I mentioned this in another reply above, but last time I voted in Maine (2004), we still had the nice, simple, paper-and-marker ballots.
That's far too complicated for me. I'm originally from Maine, where all we had was a big sheet of paper with a list of names and a broken arrow next to each name (- >). Each voting booth had a table and a marker, and you'd fill in the arrow next to the name you wanted to vote for (so it became -->). I haven't voted in any other states yet (I moved to Massachusetts this past year), but I'm somewhat scared about how much more complicated places can make voting than what Maine did.