As much as I love bashing the TSA, could we please get some statistics to back this up first, and then deal with it properly rather than just whining? I want to get the problem solved, but "I feel like some crime has been committed against me" is even weaker than the standard RIAA logic...

If your test is simple enough that it can be turned into a script for a person to run, turn it into a script for a computer to run, and then go test some other more interesting part of the system

From the distro, sure; but isn't most work on all desktops done by the upstreams? Enlightenment isn't officially supported by any distro AFAIK, and it runs wonderfully just having the official E team working on it and no interference :P

Noobs get the noob desktop. Professionals get apt-get so they can install a hundred other desktops for themselves. Where's the problem?

I don't; I do install Enlightenment though :-) But yeah, I don't get why people, on slashdot of all places, seem so mortified when an OS default setting gets changed - as though they're not only using the defaults, but don't know how to change them other than by switching distro...

Oh, I have the latest browser plugin - but this is the latest stand-alone version (that I'm aware of), which seems to have better performance and stability for flash games (those that are compatible at least)

I've had the stand-alone flash player installed in my home directory for a while, moving with me across distros and hardware -- it was installed on 32-bit debian in 2006, and it's still working on my 64-bit ubuntu 11.10 install today.</anecdote>

What about most of the Netherlands, 25% of which would be sea if not for man's engineering?

The only problem I have with OpenID is that it's so web-centric it's a pain in the ass to implement for native apps. Could we please have a distributed ID system that *can* use a web browser, but doesn't *require* one?

Hounds? I'd rather he released the photos!

if google shut down completely, how would people google for information on how to stop these acts? :-P

I have a hanns-g monitor with nothing smart about it at all, and it takes 10-15 seconds to go from power on to displaying something, and has 5-10 seconds of blankness when switching resolution (even "switching" from 1080p to 1080p). Much slower than even their slightly older models, and I have no idea why. I dread to think how painful it would be with an OS installed...

XBMC already runs nicely on the pi; the software-rendered GUI maxes out the CPU (I'm not sure if this is before or after the software renderer improvements they're working on), but hardware accelerated 1080p30 playback is fine - one of the XBMC developers was given access to an alpha board IIRC. Apparently the integration is one of the many things the Pi people have been asked not to talk about, so I presume things are brewing behind the scenes and they don't want to be assaulted with questions until it's 100% finished.

As I understand it, the magnet is effectively the hash of the .torrent file; given the magnet, a client will connect to the distributed database of .torrent files and download it from there, and then carry on as if it had downloaded the .torrent over HTTP. Like a meta-bittorrent, using P2P to take the load away from TPB's centralised servers :-P

Third party frameworks are required for basic web functionality, in a language whose explicit primary market is web apps?

Wrong, "." is correct for string concatenation, "+" however is perfectly valid PHP syntax. PHP will accept the code, run it, and do something stupid with it. Using "." for concatenation is rare, but I can live with it, and I accept that it's my fault for getting them confused - however, "foo" + "bar" should in that case be a syntax error or a cast-to-int error, not a valid way to specify numeric zero.

In general, the PHP philosophy of "we know parse errors are annoying, so we'll silently make a guess at what you might mean, and then do something unrelated" is a really bad philosophy for a programming language to have.

I have RTFM, I know that it works as advertised. The way that it is advertised as working is retarded and inconsistent, even by PHP standards :-) "It's documented, so it's a feature" is a terrible excuse, but it's the excuse that seems to be used for pretty much the entire platform (see: some function names have underscores and others don't, see also func($haystack, $needle) vs func($needle, $haystack), see also how all across the documentation there are caveats, warnings, and gotchas that a developer needs to know, where in any good language the standard library just works no questions asked...).

If it doesn't work, why is the function there? In several other cases, platform-specific functions are left undefined on some platforms, so you can do "if(function exists) {use function} else {use backup}", which is fair enough. But now I have to do "if(function exists and platform isn't windows)" because it's defined but broken. If PHP was at least consistent in its brokenness, I could put up with it; but every part of it seems to be broken in a different way.

False, the issues I've mentioned in PDO aren't there in any of the Python or Java database abstraction layers I've used. Sure, the SQL syntax can be different depending on the back-end; but in PHP, the abstraction layer itself acts differently depending on the back end.

My own servers are relatively up to date, but when I'm writing code to be distributed, I need to keep dealing with PHP's inbred mutant history. Yeah, all languages improve and writing to a legacy spec is annoying, but I've never met a language whose legacy is as horrible and as alive as PHP's.

This also reminds me of the red vs blue quote; PHP proponents keep admitting that version $current-1 was completely stupid and broken, claiming that version $current is good. It isn't, it's still crap, it's just going to take you until version $current+1 to realise it. Again, yes, other languages improve -- but when I look back on old versions of C or Erlang I think "those are good, but the new features make life easier", I don't think "whoever designed this must've been dropped at birth, but I'm sure upgrading to the latest version will make everything perfect and they'll never make a mistake like that again".

Bonus problem! Keeping up to date is a pain in itself, when the PHP devs are happy to break compatability and only increment the minor version number.

Funnily enough, Logo was my first programming language - while restrictive, I found it far more pleasant to work with than PHP; behaviour was consistent, predictable, and sensible. I didn't need to memorise the list of documented WTFs, I didn't need to deal with the interpreter crashing with no debug output, I didn't need to file bug reports when basic language features (not even API features, but the language itself) are broken...