Except for customers living in areas whose incumbent home ISP has decided to "slow-lane" any traffic that doesn't pay the prioritization toll. See previous stories about Comcast's "congestion by choice".

How can someone usefully publish any application at any time for an iOS device without the blessing of Apple, or any application at any time for a game console without the blessing of the console's manufacturer?

If the gatekeeper model has "been discarded", then why do iOS and the game consoles still use it? And why haven't end users "discarded" them en masse in favor of Android and living-room gaming PCs? I think I know why: consoles are easy.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to jump in and reap benefits without running the risk of being bankrupted or worse. For example, I don't want to write a song and then get hit with a $150,000 copyright infringement lawsuit for having accidentally recreated something from decades ago.

More than likely, in a world without PHP, another language with similar benefits and drawbacks to PHP would likely have been invented.

Not if you have to pay hush money to copyright trolls who claim that your work is a derivative of theirs. And not if a monopolist gatekeeper or a cartel of gatekeepers controls the means of distribution of your art to the public, such as Apple or the major video console makers.

Perpetual exclusive rights in a trademark cannot be used to extend the theoretically limited term of any of the exclusive rights under a U.S. copyright. Dastar v. Fox.

Even if I create my own things, how can I be sure that I haven't accidentally re-created someone else's things?

The US Supreme Court has consistently deferred to Congress on the question of whether "it is designed to satisfy that goal."

Let me rephrase Ol Olsoc's question: How much of a royalty does the Bach family deserve from Claudio Arrau and his label?

I've always considered SMB to be a steaming pile of crap for reasons that have nothing to do with security and this incident just adds another steaming shovel full of manure to that pile. The best protection agains SMB worms is not to use crap like SMB but pick something more secure instead, that is to say if such an animal even exists. In that case you can either try to find a vendor who offers a similar product and does a better job of testing and patching it than Microsoft does or go with an Open Source alternative which gives you the option of hiring a third party to test and patch it to your satisfaction. Mind you even if SMB is a pain to use the problem does not necessarily have to be with Microsoft. The problem could actually be with your systems department being lazy and negligent about patching their SMB software and the problem could also be with lax, amateurish or even non existent security policies or if you do have a proper security policy the problem could be a complete failure to enforce it. In that case you really only have one alternative and that is to light a fire under your people, fire them if they put up a fight and hire some proper sysadmins and a security chief with the same attitude toward instilling professionalism and security awareness in your employees and a marine drill sergeant has toward making proper soldiers out of every batch of teenage drama queens he is handed by the recruitment office.

Sites that do not require payment still need to distinguish between users that have registered and visitors that have not as well as between users, such as for comment sections (are you LordWabbit2 or someone who Firesheeped his session cookie?) or "free reg. req." policies.

Anyone who wants his users to know they are connecting to the correct proxy. Remember that a root certificate contains only the public key, not the private key.

MediaWiki is written in PHP. Would you really prefer a world without Wikipedia?

How often do you see Server Message Block spelled out in news stories? I guess someone really wanted to avoid implying that Sony Computer Entertainment's rival Nintendo might be behind the attack.

Re-parsed with explicit punctuation: "Sure beats the overstuffed, doilies-everywhere style..."

How can I avoid "consum[ing] that slop" if grocery stores play proprietary music over their speaker system, the royalties for which come out of the price of the groceries I buy?

How is that possible when all major TV news sources that cover candidates for federal office share a corporate parent with one of the members of the MPAA? Fox=Fox, CBS=Paramount, ABC=Disney, NBC=Universal, and CNN=Warner. A candidate for federal office who openly opposes the excesses of what copyright has become will draw smear campaigns from all five of these studios' co-owned news channels.

Apart from the fact that you're mixing UPDATE syntax with INSERT syntax, substitution is perfectly valid so long as each string has been sanitized in the correct manner for a particular database connection (that is, not addslashes()). For the MySQLi client library, it looks like this:

$fname = $db->escape_string($fname);
$lname = $db->escape_string($lname);

Don't get me wrong; it's bad practice to escape manually unless you're using operator IN on a database client library that supports neither array parameters nor named placeholders (such as MySQLi). But code that correctly uses $db->escape_string() (or the equivalent for other languages or database drivers) should be safe from SQL injection, just as code that correctly uses htmlspecialchars() should be safe from script injection.

But how long do you keep these mirrors around, in case there's a screw-up that goes undiscovered for a while?