Lordy. I know I shouldn't have RTFA, but this guy Horowitz comes across as the biggest asshole not featured on a .cx TLD.

He sounds like a reject from a 50s infomercial.

What an insufferable prick.

So you are the majority of Brits now?

Third world it may be, but Ecuador is not a dictatorship, it's a functioning representational democracy.

No doubt the US will be along soon to turn it into a dictatorship, as it did in Brazil, Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Argentina and Dominican Republic.

As a citizen and former resident of the UK, I can assure you that it is not the most civilised nation on earth.

For confirmation, visit pretty much any town -- Guildford for example -- on a Saturday night!

If a UK citizen wanted to piss away their life savings on healthcare, they could do just that, as private healthcare is also available in the UK. It's very cheap too, as it has to compete with the NHS and out culture isn't (yet) as litigious.

In any case, medical error is responsible for between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths in the US every year, so there would be plenty of fodder for a US version of the Daily Fail.

Neither. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exactly as much to do with women, education and religious freedom as they have to do with exploring Mars.

Which is to say, nothing at all.

Nothing requires arrests to be made, but surely threats of violence are by their nature 'menacing'?

What utter jingoistic bollocks. The US and USSR both tried and failed to build supersonic transport.

Manned space flight was just as much a vanity project.

It appears to me from the photos that at least two out the three assailants are white, as are the three people you can see working behind the counter.

But don't let the facts stand in the way of your bigotry!

Heineken-only bars everywhere?

Here in Lyon, France there are a lot of Kronenbourg-only bars!

Far, far worse.

Thankfully, decent Belgian beer is pretty easy to find.

Here are a couple of theories:

They wanted to stay involved with the technology (it was their "third child" after all). More stock == more control.

-- and/or --

L&H told them that their share price would rocket once they had Dragon's technology, so they would make more money by taking stock.

Truthiness is a perfectly cromulent word, even if the poster hasn't quite used it correctly.

I completely agree. But look at the butt hurt over the fix to number_format() et al.

They really are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

If you pass a string to number_format(), php generates a warning.

People whine about php being inconsistent, then when they make changes to make it more consistent, people whine.

They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

The fine individual who reported the 'bug':

• Has warnings turned off in his php config (OK for production, but stupid for development)
• Jumps two major versions of php without reading the documentation (this change is the first item on the upgrade notes for php 5.3)
• Is passing around strings and expecting them to behave like numbers in an application for tax and retirement planning.
• And surely the biggest WTF of the lot: He thinks that redirecting calls to number_format to a wrapper function will be hard to get through his 'change-request-release environment', but running and maintaining a private fork of php will be no problem

There's enough to criticise about php without attacking a straw man.

It doesn't silently fail. It generates a warning:

Warning: number_format() expects parameter 1 to be double, string given in /foo/bar/baz.php on line X

Which is why you don't disable warnings.

Maybe you want php to treat warnings as errors? No problem:

set_error_handler().