I don't think you get to count a TARDIS twice just because it exists at multiple points along its history. If that were the case, then the universe contains millions of me!

There was an article a couple of years ago looking at how much US politicians who voted for particular legislation were given by lobbyists in favour of that legislation. It turns out that plutocrats actually don't pay that much for politicians...

For something like Jekyll, this also applies to the input. I use it for a couple of sites and, in both cases, the sources are Markdown files (easy to edit with your favourite text editor) stored in a git repo. When I'm working on updates, I run 'jekyll serve' locally and get a copy of the site on the loopback. When I want to push them, I can do jekyll build and then rsync the results to the web server (or do something more clever if I'm less lazy and want atomic updates). The entire change history of the site is stored in revision control and the revision control system contains everything necessary to recreate the site at any point in its history.

I've yet to see a CMS that allows trivial rollback to earlier versions of the site or which makes it easy to store the content in such a way that a compromised web server can't damage it.

I'm not sure I agree with your first premise. There are fairly trivial combinators that you can write in lambda calculus that are conditional flow control (i.e. reduce to either the left or right lambda expression based on a value). The implementation of ifTrue in Smalltalk (loosely) follows this model.

Only if the unconditional branch is a computed branch. Otherwise how would you implement a program that either terminates or does not terminate based on user input? The example that comes to mind is the x86 MOV instruction which, with a single unconditional backwards branch is Turing complete, but this relies on several other aspects of the surroundings that allow you to implement a conditional branch (or, at least, a select, which is morally equivalent).

The simplest Turing-complete instruction set is a subtract-and-branch-if-not-negative instruction, but this is a conditional branch.

I agree that conditional flow control is slightly too broad a requirement, as it depends on an imperative model. Conditional execution depending on input data might be a better way of phrasing it.

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.