I was referring more to C++ really and the way OO stuff has been bolted on top of an existing language, but your right I haven't used it in years. I moved from C to PHP and was very comfortably straight away due to the familiarity with many of the functions.

With regard to the magic everything most have that has gone from PHP nowadys. The only thing left is it being untyped and that is what Hack is designed to change.

Maybe you have reading problems, but I never said PHP was the only language anybody ever wrote anything worthwhile in. I said it was the most widely used, that does not mean nobody uses anything else.

Every developer I know bitches about the tools we use, that doesn't mean we don't think they are useful.

People always moan about how horrible PHP is, and I always assume that the people moaning are trying to learn the language without having a basis in C because they have come straight from Ruby or some other perfectly designed load of academic twaddle nobody uses.

The reality is that PHP is like C, an amazingly flexible and well used tool. Yes, it has tons of quirks due to its slow evolution where they maintain backwards compatibility, but that is it's strength in the real world since nobody wants to rewrite their entire system just to use a new version of a language.

There are tons of things better than PHP, but PHP is more well used than all of them because the purist developers who like to create perfect systems generally do not create much. The people who do are the armchair warriors who throw together something like Facebook then realise they have created a horrible puddle of code with a ton of technical debt that just happens to be a popular product that actually makes money. The purists have a habit of getting bogged down in producing wonderful code that takes ages, never makes any money and so get consigned to the scrap heap when the company folds.

What they have done is layer a statically typed language on top of PHP so that they can still run their existing PHP code as they slowly convert it to a typed language. Maybe their end game is to move away from PHP, but maybe they will stay with Hack to they can carry on recruiting PHP developers who then have an easy transition. This is another reason why PHP is so popular with companies: commercially experienced PHP developers are much easier to find than commercially experienced Ruby developers, or even Python.

Gmail messages are encrypted from the time they leave a user's machine to the time they leave Google's infrastructure.

Horseshit. The message is not encrypted. It is cleartext travelling over encrypted channels. It is on their machines in the clear, which enables them to do things for you, like search and filter, and against you, like profiling you and anyone who sends you email.

I agree with your analogy right up to the security guard bit, in this case they didn't have one. The problem is that legally it is still possible to trespass on private property when the property is not protected by any sort of lock. I am not saying that ATT were not utterly crap and lax, but what this guy did was also illegal.

The other problem he seems to face though is that he is bit of a caustic twat. I have a feeling that any half decent lawyer could easily bate him in court into saying something stupid and that is probably roughly what happened for him to be convicted. Once he had alienated the jury he was screwed, since based on the embarrassment he had caused the judge was obviously going to throw the book at him.

I dunno; put it in an acid bath and see what happens.

Just put it in the bin where it belongs :)

Apparently they never felt the need to invest in HR until recently.

You can replace "women" in the above sentence with "people" and it is more accurate.

The truth is that learning to give people constructive criticism is very difficult for many people (myself included). The trick for me is to be aware that as soon as you lose your rag or behave in a condescending manner you are utterly in the wrong, no matter how valid the point you are trying to make is.

I think the big problem for many of us is that when we were young we spent far too much time in front of computers or with very geeky peers who did not mind when we spoke to each other with a bit of a lack of respect. That built up habits that you have to break. I guess geek culture has this idea of being tolerant of being rude, whereas when you have to start working with people in the real world you discover that not everyone has that same level of tolerance and should not be expected to develop it.

I think you should try and treat everyone in exactly the same manner, that means no special treatment for men, or people of any other minority. Everyone should be treated with politeness and respect at all times.

No, often it works because if one person outside your organisation discovers something then when you get that issue raised with you it is pretty easy to take that to management and show them why the bug needs fixing. If one person can find it so can someone else who is less honest and hence might use it for fraud.

So responsible disclosure works because even if the threat is never disclosed fully by the person who found it, it might be discovered by some one else independently.

Good to know England is once again fighting to keep the world safe from those who advocate the violent overthrow of the lawful government.

SoA bitching about Google

Google bitching about copyright

Apple bitching about Samsung

Microsoft and Google bitching about each other

Sprint ripping off the warrantless surveillance program

University of Phoenix poisoning the student loan program

The Koch brothers and friends are always bitching about the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance when they work full time. I'm a lot more sick of the rich and their sense of entitlement to be a little richer, often with a little government intervention needed to get them there.

A control mechanism need not involve only limiting something (showing restraint). It may be active, and add to the process as well.

While I think you are absolutely correct for the majority in the short run, for the entire population in the long run, and for the economy in the short and long run, I think that solving the problems this study explores necessarily will have costs for at least some of the most affluent and powerful in the short run. If economic stratification really does contribute to collapse, and limiting stratification it is a necessary part of the solution, it's going to limit someone's short-run upside.

'You can't kid a kidder. Having been a lobbyist, he knows all their tricks,' says Blair Levin.

So this is what we've been reduced to? The disconsolate wish, having turned the regulatory body over to one of the kleptarchs, that he will discover not only his duty to society but also unbiased objectivity, and turn on his own? A ray of hope so thin strains my credulity.

Any decent engineer could probably put together a PID loop or two (possibly cascaded) to keep stability in the system, but what would you use as a control mechanism?

And what would you do if the most powerful and affluent had a great deal to lose if we attemped to put such controls in place? Suppose they had powerful PR machines, sharpened through years of product marketing and fierce political campaigns, at their disposal to sew disdain for those who advocate such restraint.

"May you live in interesting times."