Interrogator: Sir, you contend that you did not knowingly inflate those footballs with heated air?

Equipment Manager: Well, I didn't know it would be a problem. I always wondered why our air compressor was hooked up to the furnace.

The last relatively serious thing I used it for was to draw tree form illustrations using a Wacom. I had always like the application, but this use made it clear how much more usable it had become than Illustrator. Granted, Illustrator might have made some changes in the handful of years since I've bothered, but I've preferred Inkscape's UI because it's just so much less clicky.

Glad to see the long-awaited new version. Hopefully they fixed some of the annoying bugs I saw using the drawing tablet.

Mr. Nobody.

It's a great film. All those pointless decisions that get made that shape the things around us and, in turn, the world for ever. Just imagine, had that nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestor of yours decided to head back out to hunt rather than go home, you, and everyone in your lineage, would fail to exist.

In that moment when that ancestor was deciding which way to go, everything was possible.

Mann was on Charlie Rose last night. It was interesting listening to them talk about this kind of stuff, but it did sort of feel contrived. I mean, I love Charlie Rose and all, and some of his interviews are incredibly good, but this felt forced.

They were talking about a scene where good guy gets the drop on bad guy amidst some sort of cultural festival. Bad guy whips out automatic weapon while there's a steady stream of people ignoring them and doing their cultural festival thing. Good guy has no automatic weapon but seems perfectly confident about having a gun pointed at him by someone that looks pretty scared. I'm just not buying it.

The interview also had loads of praise for Mann as being so thorough and leaving no detail overlooked. Meh, I think he might have missed a few things.

Do you imply that redistributed PHP frameworks are the problem. In 2015, do you have some alternative suggestions?

I feel like you're saying it would be a great thing if everyone went back to CFML, because you know, hey, it's great having to pay for all your software tools. Of course freely distributed software is going to cause "bad stuff" to happen. I'm pretty sure licensed software isn't immune, either, it's just a different flavor of "bad stuff".

You make a great point, don't get me wrong, it's just that you left it hanging too low. What if we want to have our cake and eat it too? Where does the guy go who thinks, "yeah, I'm totally gonna put all of PHP's crap on the lawn, I don't care if they're paying rent"? In 2015, if I want to build software based on distributed frameworks but I want to do it without any "bad stuff", where do I go?

Javascript/Node? But then I get stereotyped as a fucking douchebag hipster that couldn't code my way out of Prius. I classify that as "bad stuff".

Python? Then I get to be the guy that's always talking but nobody listens. Also "bad stuff".

ASP.NET? Oh ... right. If this is the answer I'm moving up to the mountains to grow pot and fish for trout. Full time.

Meanwhile, back in "work week" land, I'll head back to the office tomorrow and start chugging away on PHP built on a distributed framework with tons of "bad stuff". I will use the money I earn from this job to do tons of other "bad stuff" like, you know, pay bills, buy food, grow pot, fish for trout .. etc.

Wordpress is widely adopted. Very widely. The #1 reason it is insecure is because it is targeted so often.

Is that PHP's fault?

Along with WP, plenty of other platforms plainly store their database credentials in some config file. It might be PHP, maybe XML, maybe JSON ... irrelevant. The credentials are stored in plaintext on the server.

Is that PHP's fault?

All these platforms do things in their own way. I'm a Magento developer and it is a platform that is notorious for it's complexity. I understand it pretty damn well, but the majority of the code I see was clearly written by folks who don't understand it very well. I've seen /www/var/log left wide open and the justification was that /www/var/log doesn't contain anything important. Just errors and stuff like that. For those paying attention, what's the difference between Mage::log($order, null, 'orders.log') and Mage::log($order->debug(), null, 'orders.log')? If you said, "the first one will log the entire object -- including database credentials", you get a cookie.

I'm talking about Magento specifically there, but every platform has it's own thing and twists PHP into doing things a bit differently. This fragments the understanding of the code and results in company XYZ hiring a "PHP developer" when they should have hired "Platform X developer".

I am wary of the statistics presented by this article simply because they don't take into account platform insecurities and the plethora of code that was written with a lack of full understanding. The number of "insecure" PHP sites is probably much closer to 100% than advertised, but it usually isn't PHP's fault.

Exactly.

When considering the question of "God", it's possible that the god/entity that created us has its own god that created it. Who is to say that our god is the same god as any given alien creature?

It's also possible that our definition of "artificial" or "synthetic" is not universal. Maybe in the eyes of some alien, we are the ones who are artificial.

Think just for a moment about plant tissue cultures. You take some chunk of a plant, stick it in a dish and give it some food, and ultimately you may end up with an entirely new plant clone from one tissue sample. That tissue sample might be a piece of leaf, but it will still be able to grow other plant tissues like roots, bark, flowers, etc. To me, this is evidence of a form of "engineering" as well as a very interesting lesson in biological recursion.

This is part of it, yes.

The fundamental problem is you have loads of ecommerce sites that were built as turn-key solutions and handed over to an "admin" for the company. They can start creating their own content to add to the site, so they start searching for things to add to their site. They find snake-oil dealers that offer them everything in exchange for a small script element inserted into the DOM.

Additionally, the admins haven't taken the time to learn how to save images for the web properly, and they serve a 900x600 image that's a handful of MBs (x6 for a simple slideshow).

Between the excess of HTTP requests added by the tracking scripts and the excess of MBs being downloaded for images / video, it is not a surprise that ecommerce sites are getting slower. I would expect this trend to continue to some degree.

Those Onion articles always crack me up. It's hilarious how close their satire comes to reality ... it's ... erh ... oh.

I would be interested to read some real stats on the percentage of people who have bought a UPS and actually needed it for important things.

If you ask me, they're mostly a giant waste of batteries.

Yeah, but that guy works at Best Buy and is smarter about computers than you.

Look at how narrow minded you are. You ride a bike 50km each day to and from work in Germany, therefore everyone across the world should be able to do the same.

I do ride to work every day. It's pretty close, only about 10 minutes after I stop and get morning beverages. For the last week it has been in the single digits F and the roads have been iced over. I actually rode to work on Monday as the roads weren't bad yet (though it was still frigid). I got to work and was surprised to see that 80% of the office was out.

The rest of this week, though, I most definitely got a ride to work instead of riding. I'm already worried enough about distracted drivers and pedestrians not paying attention (I dodge several accidents each week) that adding an icy road and sub-zero temperatures is just asking for trouble.

And really, studded snow tires? That might work for people where the snow stays around for months. Here in Denver, we went from a sunny 70 degree weekend to sub-zero temps in less than 48 hours. In a week's time, we will probably be back up into the 50's with sunshine. Personally, I don't see having to switch your wheelsets out every couple of days before work as an acceptable solution.