Uranus, like Myanus, loses atmosphere often. I usually blame it on Dogsanus.

OK, so if I grab your spare key under your front door mat, did your Schlage deadbolt get "picked"? No, poor OpSec. If I drop my key fob to my car, and you use the remote open door feature to find it and steal my car. Did GM's laser cut key database get "hacked?" No. GM isn't at fault because I made a mistake. A hack is when someone gets a system to act in an unintended way. Ring is performing as expected: put in a valid username and password, then gain entry. They don't report to have biometrics or other means to authenticate it's you. Hell, a sophisticated threat would clone your phone anyway, making the 2-factor call your phone as well as his. This happens often for higher value targets, but rarely makes the news because the threat is much more sophisticated. That said, yes, you're right. Ring could add sophisticated measures but it's not my bank account we are securing. They're cameras. All of mine are outside so I really don't care if you hacked my 4 Ring cameras. You would see my neighbors doing their laundry and me leaving every morning and coming home 6 hours later. This is why my Echo Show has the camera disabled 99.999% of the time. Hack it and you see nothing.

Right. Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD do it. This is what separates good engineers from geniuses. To me this is the classic Android versus Apple argument as well. Sure you can do everything on both, but the Apple is more polished. A 2nd grader and a 72 year old can figure an iPhone out without instructions. As you mention, you can spend hours on it, just to be hacked anyway. Or, just buy the Ring and turn on 2-step authentication like you probably should do anyway (RPi, or commercial).

That's akin to saying, "I have absolutely no sympathy for idiots who buy a house when someone breaks in and stabs them. This goes for garages too." The person who took over their account is breaking the law. Period. Not everyone understands security and often re-uses passwords. Do you realize Titan, Schalge and Defiant reuse keys for deadbolts and door locks? Is it ok if I use a set of keys to get into your house and steal everything? "We have no sympathy for idiots who don't understand tumblers and pins of the locks inside their home." How about your car? How about I hack the OBD2 system to make your transmission shift into reverse while you do 70mph down the highway? "I have no sympathy for idiots who don't understand their cars on-board diagnotic system." How about your grandmother who is in intensive care at the hospital? Hospital Wifi is known to be unsecure. Do you have zero sympathy when a hacker shuts down her life supporting systems? Grandma deserves it since she doesn't understand encryption and information security, right?

Turn on two factor authentication and don't reuse passwords. That's the simple lesson here. This 'Crap' you mention has saved a little girl who was kidnapped right in front of their house, led to arrest and prosecution of home invaders who nearly killed a homeowners dog, and cut down on crime in many areas.

I think 9/11 is so far back and most Americans are so apathetic they either didn't know or have forgotten 9/11 wasn't the first attack. It wasn't the 2nd. It was in the teens.. Meaning we were in well over double digits. Khobar Towers sound familiar? USS Cole sound familiar? The Twin Towers in NYC had already been bombed once before. We ignored them. We "kept our troops at home." Problem is, the camps in Afghanistan kept pumping out skilled personnel who learned how to bomb and kill people.

Imagine you have a meth lab next door. Would you tell the cops, "Well, don't invade their home. Just arrest the street dealers. That will solve the problem. Leave the meth lab alone." That's exactly what you're saying when you say, "Don't invade Afghanistan." We had to invade Germany to stop Hitler. We had to nuke Japan to get them to stop suicide attacking throughout the Pacific, and we had to invade Afghanistan to stop the Osama Bin Laden sponsored and Taliban (the government back then) hosted terrorist camps. We also invaded Iraq to get them to stop shooting at F-16s and threatening neighbors, but that narrative has been hijacked by the whole "no WMDs found" false flag. Any one recall how many UN security resolutions were passed telling Saddam to knock his shit off?? Anyone? How many talked about WMDs? (hint: almost none)

The problem however, as we learn everywhere is, "Power abhors a vacuum." If you take out one evil power, you are an open host to what ever else can take its place.

Correct. 350k was nothing compared to the rate we were losing soldiers as we island hopped and tried to defeat Japan. They also refused to surrender and would fight to the last person. They were also convincing local populations to commit suicide rather than wait to see what happened when the Allies liberated their lands, although some were also just murdered. Hard to say how much is fact and fiction in these stories. For anyone skeptical, take a look at how many Russians died kicking Germany out. 26 million... and that was mostly on defense. Going onto the offense makes attrition rates go up.

Beeftopia seems to be the only response I've seen that really understands PsyOps (Psychological Operations in warfare), and the differences.

I worked at Home Depot for over 5 years, and have spent time inside the loss prevention office. They are not face scanning and tracking you through the store. If they are tracking you, it's a guy who's watching a dozen camera feeds and switching between them. If they catch you stealing, it takes awhile for them to take the video from the different cameras and make a CD for the arresting officer. The time depends on how long you spent in the store and how much you moved around.

Those cameras on the aisles are stand alone and not part of the system. They're really just to make you aware they're focusing on that high-theft part of the store (e.g. power tools in Hardware, and $90 circuit breakers in Electrical). Each store has a staff of Loss Prevention, and most employees will ignore you even if you're an obvious thief. They are instructed not to touch you and in some cases I was admonished for asking them "Can I help you?" I got pissed because your thieving takes away money from my bonus. My store probably easily lost over $1M a year to thieves. If you walk in, grab a torch from hardware, a bluetooth speaker, and a $90 Klein electricians backpack.... everyone in the store knows what's happening. And walkie talkies... I did the math. For every pair of walkie talkies sold, 2 were stolen. $200k sold in a year, and about $600k stolen.. just in walkie talkies from my store alone.

Yes, they track people by sales receipts and your Drivers License. This is how they catch people who fraudulently return very high numbers of products. Usually it's stolen but not always. Again, you're robbing the people who work there when you fraudulently return products. That "shrink" reduces revenue, which reduces the employee bonus.

Soyuz lands on dry earth by using a combination of parachutes and rockets. A series of small solid rocket motors do a "braking burn", igniting one second before landing. And even then, a Soyuz landing is often compared to a road-speed car crash.

AFAIK no Mars lander used solely parachutes. They all used retrorockets (Viking, Curiosity), or airbags (Mars Express), or both (Pathfinder, Opportunity/Spirit). While Mars has less gravity than Earth, it has even less air, so parachutes are mainly used to get subsonic.

Further, note that even an empty Falcon 9 booster (~30 tons) weighs substantially more than a Soyuz descent stage (2-3 tons).

Finally... SpaceX *tried* parachutes first. The first two Falcon 9 launches, back in 2010, had parachutes. It didn't work. Apparently they didn't even survive atmospheric reentry, they were disintegrating before parachutes could be deployed. Fixing that would require retropropulsion for a pre-reentry slowdown burn... and if you've figured that out, and added all the new capabilities required (with all the mass that entails), it makes sense to use that for final landing as well, instead of a separate system. So, three years later, they started those preliminary soft-landing-in-water tests. Took them a year to start getting those to work, then another year to get actual landings to work. And now, it only makes the news when one *doesn't* work. Seems like they made the right call.

I don't think that's quite the case.

Of all the social media sites, Tumblr is by far the closest to "just show me the feeds I picked, screw everything else". You see 3-4 algo-suggested, and 1 staff-suggested, blogs off to the right, just the title/description/avatar and not mixed in with your feed like Twitter does. Other than that, it's literally whatever you chose to see. Which is what people actually want out of social media, honestly.

And I really doubt much of the squicky porn resides on Tumblr. I mean, look at DeviantArt, for just one. There's a full battalion of furry sites, and other niche kinks have sites of their own. Most Japanese smut artists use Pixiv, or maybe Twitter, and let's be honest, they're behind a lot of the weirder shit. (Remember that weird "Bowsette" porn meme? It broke into Twitter's trending section, barely made a peep on Tumblr.)

Yeah, that is mildly annoying, but that's a pretty niche feature missing. I've wanted it maybe a half-dozen times in my career. (And I think it's a limitation of the underlying C APIs as well?)

If you *need* to spawn subprocesses, there is a module for it. It's not something 99% of users ever need to do, and is usually a sign that you're either using the wrong language entirely, or are architecting things completely ass-backwards.

Language design, as I said, is as much about choosing what features to leave out as it is what features to add. PHP has very, very limited multiprocessing support. But C has no eval() function, and anyone asking for it would rightly be asked what the hell they were thinking. Likewise, I think it's fair to say anyone looking for top-notch multiprocessing support in PHP is doing something at least a little fucky. I've done it myself, once or twice, but it was always something PHP was not meant to do.

Preference is fine, but she is declaring a language fundamentally flawed because it doesn't match her personal preference.

Now, it is a valid complaint that PHP will often make counterintuitive or even lossy conversions, with barely a notice logged. Were I to design a PHP replacement language, I would certainly make it so that only lossless conversions can happen implicitly (eg. string "0.0" can convert to float 0.0 but not int 0). But that is still a matter of preference, and PHP's "let's try to make it work" philosophy is at least consistent here.

On the other hand, using it as a string allows some rather useful tricks. Like that pseudo-polymorphism thing I mentioned - I was writing a report generator, and needed three functions implemented for every report type. I *could* have just written one function, and made a giant switch statement for the two-dozen report types, or I could have shoehorned them into classes and objects... but instead I just set up a naming convention, and did some string concatenation to get the right function names.

Noted, thanks.

A lot of those are things that are technically still in the language, but there are far better ways to do them now.

For instance, mysql_real_escape_string() was always a hack. The actual solution was proper placeholder syntax, which to be fair MySQL didn't support at the time even in its C API. We got that (in I think PHP5) with PDO, which is also database-agnostic.

The lack of type hinting in function return types was added (I think PHP7?).

Others are things that are clearly the result of the article author being a low-level programmer, and not understanding high-level language concepts.

The lack of parallel programming is because it's designed as a web server scripting language. You extract parallelism by having multiple requests from multiple users, not from running each request multithreaded. And given just how complicated multithreading is, and how incredibly hard it is to get right, it's just not worth it. Making a good programming language is as much about what you leave out as add in. (and if you 100% need multithreading, there's a library mentioned *later in that article* to do so)

The "redundant" syntax for blocks ("if (){ ... }" and "if: ... endif;") is actually quite useful. In big chunks of procedural code, curly braces are far more readable, but in code intermingled with HTML output, "endif" and cousins do a better job of telling you what block just closed.

The author seems to completely misunderstand what weak typing *is*. He knows about type hints in function parameters, but complains that you can pass a string with a numeric value to a function calling for an int, and it will just be converted to an int instead of throwing an error. Why is that an error? In C-like languages it's an error because the variable has machine-level type that's fixed throughout its lifetime, but in weakly-typed languages, if you can convert it into an int, it *is* an int.

In his complaints about E_STRICT, he mentions "using a variable as a function name". Which, if I understand what he's referring to right, is again a feature. You can use a variable to get a function name - "$foo()" will take the string value of $foo, and look for a function with that name. I've done pseudo-polymorphism this way.

What the hell is your point? Nobody who takes climate change as fact is throwing options off the table (except maybe the "start WW3 so nuclear winter counteracts the warming effects", I think we can write that off as causing more problems than it solves).

If you're a classic twitch shooter player, it probably wouldn't be fun for you.

It's much more a positioning-based game than a reaction/aiming game. You can get by with pretty bad aim *if* you're good at being in the most advantageous position at the right time (including building things while moving - top-level Fortnite players move nothing like normal FPS because they'll construct staircases and gangways as they run on them). It's also much slower-paced, with long periods of downtime between combat, and a heavy social aspect (playing as an informal team with friends, not alone, and more for fun than for winning).

If you're looking for a game along the lines of Quake 3 or UT2004, there's not much of recent vintage that will compete. Quake Champions is basically Q3A with character-specific special abilities, there's an Unreal Tournament "reboot" that's playable but doesn't seem to be in development anymore, and a handful of indie "spiritual successors" like Reflex and Warsow.

Hero shooters along the lines of Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch *might* be your thing. They're much, much more focused on teamwork and have roles other than "shoot the other guy first", but they have arena shooter-style movement and wide weapon variety. But they're also downright infested with microtransactions, even if you pay for the game itself, and the massive team focus might not be your thing.

As someone who has tried developing a new arena shooter, there are two problems. First, the genre was pretty close to perfected by the time of Q3A and UT2004. Other than balance and maybe tacking on more and more weapons, there's just not much you can change that's actually an improvement, that doesn't push you into a different genre. Second, like fighting games, it's become quite an elitist, insular genre. Most people currently playing twitch arena shooters have been playing for a decade plus, and they're *good*. Being competitive games, new players come in and immediately get *thrashed* - and then never play any twitch shooter again, because losing 0-50 isn't fun. The established players aren't even a great market because they already have games they've mastered, they aren't looking for new ones, just slight refinements (a lot of modern indie ones even have remakes of the major Quake/Unreal maps, to try to lure those players over).

(I abandoned mine because the One Big Thing I was trying to do differently turned out to control very, very poorly. Fortunately, I only spent two months prototyping it and trying different control schemes, before abandoning it as unworkable. So before anyone asks, no, there's no public builds of it, and I won't be making any available because a) it was never really in fully-playable state, and b) I might salvage that One Big Thing for a different game in the future.)

That is not what my 50% figure was estimating.

My expectation is, of the cases that are granted certiorari, roughly equal numbers will be upheld vs overturned. This is specifically because the court selects the cases to try from a much larger pool. Cases where the lower court is obviously correct will not be accepted. Because cases must normally go through multiple lower levels, there are very few where the lower court is obviously wrong. With strong systems against cases with little dispute, we are left (or so I expect) with roughly equal probabilities for both "uphold" and "overturn", in the long run.

That's not how taking cases to the Supreme Court works. Nobody, least of all the plaintiffs, can force them to take a case, they generally do so only when there's either a break between jurisdictions (Nth Circuit ruled one way, N+1th Circuit the other) or an actual dispute as to whether a law is constitutional. I would expect the long-term average for cases accepted by the Supreme Court to be around 50%, because they only take ones that are close.