Pressing a key on the keyboard uses symbols to control the behaviour of a computer. If your definition is that broad then absolutely any interaction that you have with a computer is programming and so the concept is meaningless.

You mean it was brave of them to say 'this format is working well for Babylon 5, I wonder if it will work if we do it with a series with a lot more brand recognition and a much bigger budget?'

This is true, but those times also had significantly higher ice concentrations. Paint a big chunk of the ground (and sea area) white and you'll see the

If you can say this with a straight face, then you have no idea of the history of the climate.

Not even slightly. It has assignment, it has things with defined execution order that have side effects. There are declarative query languages, but SQL is not one of them.

Doesn't Windows come with one of these built in? I might be remembering from the Server version, as it's quite a few years since I last ran Windows, but in Windows 2000 it was something you could enable in the services management interface.

It's quite difficult to argue that something that is a transparent cache and will always provide the requested data, just sometimes from a local copy, is equivalent to something that either requests or does not request the remote data and instead substitutes something else based on some external policy are equivalent.

One of the big supermarkets in the UK used to have warnings on the backs of peanut packets saying 'Warning: may contain nuts'. I was confused by this until I found a packet that had been filled entirely with air due to an error at the factory. Then I understood the warning.

Although on further reflection, it's still a bit confusing as peanuts are peas, not nuts.

Every single article in the ECHR looks like that. They're all basically of the form 'Governments may not do X, unless they really want to'.

If you think moving to China gets you away from greedy capitalism, then I can only imagine that the last time you saw any news from China was some time around 1960.

Depends. It's only snooping if they do it for recursive DNS lookups or DNS cache queries to third parties. If you set your DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google's public DNS server) or OpenDNS or similar, then modifying this requires inspecting (and hijacking) traffic intended for a third party. Most of the time, however, users will have their DNS config set to whatever DHCP provides, which means that queries will go to an ISP's server. This doesn't require any interception or inspection of traffic, it just requires sending responses that don't match. If more places would roll out DNSSEC then this would be much easier to spot.

Cars and planes also have software. The reason these engineers are allowed the time to do it right is the relative cost of doing it wrong vs doing it late. Having a web site a month late can have a big impact on a business. Having a web site with bugs or a security vulnerability is much less of a problem for a lot of places.

The simplest place to draw the line: Does it have conditional flow control? If so, it's a programming language, if not then it isn't. If you can't write some equivalent of an if statement, then it's not a programming language. There are some languages (e.g. BPF bytecodes) that are intentionally not Turing Complete, because having finite and deterministic run time is a design goal, so they omit loops, but they do have conditionals (but only forward branches).

You mean declarative, not functional. HTML does not have functions, which is a big clue that it isn't a functional language. Your other examples are just plain wrong (SQL is definitely not a functional language and isn't even a declarative language, PostScript is imperative language and is a functional language if you squint a bit).

If you don't need dynamic content, Jekyll is a very nice way to go. The template system is easy to use and it generates static HTML pages so you only need to worry about the security of the web server (which is comparatively easy). Even if you do need dynamic content, you might only need it for some parts of a page (e.g. comments) and so it's easy to embed an iframe that just provides comments for a page in a template and separate out the dynamic and static parts. This also has the nice effect of meaning that you can easily keep the content working if the comment system is compromised.

I read a few other posts on his blog. He uses Encyclopedia Dramatica as a reputable source. I can't tell if it's an elaborate troll, or if he really does have no credibility.