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Well if they do test this on humans, and if something goes wrong - they can easily fix it. Just apply a wetware update. Maybe we can even deploy wetware updates wirelessly soon. Just think of the possibilities. "Have you installed the Starbucks(tm) Wetware upgrade that makes you able to digest our latest drink, yet ?"
No fear mongering going on here. As i wrote earlier, the incident wasn't discussed in terms of being a threat in the german media.
Also, the pilot of the drone was only briefly arrested for disturbing the rally and released hours later by the police. After conducting an examination of the drone, the police concluded that it posed no threat. case closed.
This was staged by the german pirate party. They wanted to "take pictures" / draw attention to the surveillance issue.
The incident wasn't discussed in terms of being a threat in german media. Merkel was photographed smiling as the drone crashed down in front of her.
See also: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/merkel-campaign-...
I agree about the need to really strip out the bad stuff, not just deprecating.
Wrt removal of language features: They seem to be in the process of cleaning up some there as well. For example in 5.4 they removed safe mode, register globals, magic quotes (and those were really awful). see: http://php.net/releases/5_4_0.php
I also agree that there is a lot of bad stuff still around.
(can't reply to your reply so here goes)
I'd argue that PHP came out of the gate with some pretty powerful properties, too.
They hit a sweet spot of
* Being there at the right time (none of the "good" languages in your book was around or usable for web dev at the time of PHP4 and PHP5 came out)
* Being easy to learn - giving beginners quick rewards.
* Being powerful enough to do quite a bit more than "simple web pages", as you say. This enabled people to "graduate" from "simple web pages" to "web apps". In fact, most of the web was built in PHP (Wikipedia, Facebook, Wordpress runs on 50% of all webpages or so, Drupal is incredibly popular, Magento runs loads of webshops, and on and on). This has not happened merely by accident. I feel it's a bit wrongheaded to suggest otherwise.
* Being dead easy to deploy on almost any webhost (Drop files, hit them with their url, be done - almost no other language delivers this even today)
In all i feel PHP has moved the web forward tremendously. In time, itself has evolved as well. It may not have evolved as fast as one would want.
It's the C++ of the web era, really.
Javascript, of all things, wasn't neatly "designed" either. The core language was hacked together in several weeks, by a few developer at Netscape.
Javascript wasn't made for large applications. It was made for form checking and rollover menues (some of the earliest examples back in the day) ;)
It can be argued that Javascript has many unfixable design bugs, too. Just sayin.
They are doing it, though.
For example they have now deprecated the dreaded mysql_, pgsql_ interfaces (including mysql_now_escape_the_string_for_real() and the like ;) for accessing the database in favor of PDO.
They will be removed in the future. Lots of projects still use those.
Just 1 example of PHP dropping backwards compatibility. It's not quite so bad as you make it out to be.
The terms of these initiatives (Fachkräfteinitiative, Blue Card) are so one sided and onerous that very few people from outside actually use them.
These initiatives, started years ago, so far have flopped.
Immigration is unpopular here in germany. Indeed, it is very unpopular among many people.
German politicians, in the past (60s,70s,80s), have brought in many worker-immigrants mainly from turkey. They were badly needed to fill the many vacant spots in the booming economy.
They left no thought to integrating / assimilating them into the german society. Up until the 1990s the political parties in germany could not even come to grips with the fact that germany was in fact an "immmigration country". They were in denial.
Today germany has 12-14% foreigners, mostly from turkey, and many of them have not been integrated well into the german society. Also, unemployment is high among this group. Education chances are depressed, etc - you get the picture.
Now, we are in a bind. On the one hand the birth rate has been dropping for decades. This has to do with societal trends (more women working, etc) - but is a complicated issue in itself.
Only group with a healthy birth rate, ironically, are the turkish immigrants.
Politicians do not have any idea what to do about the birthrate. That has to with a cultural memory of nazi-era family policies, which rewarded having many children. It's a taboo today in german politics to try to directly induce families to have more children in any way.
The german economy is already suffering. The term "fachkräftemangel" has been coined for this- which means the industry is already finding it difficult to fill all the vacant spots with qualified personell.
In Germany,where i live, you get:
* 2/3 of your last wage for 1 year on unemployment, free health care
* After that expires you get your rent paid, free health care , and 400 euro per month for other expenses - indefinitely
On top of that everyone also gets free additional care when they are old / nursing home.
Also everyone gets a minimum pension once they reach 67 years of age.
Germany has the lowest youth unemployment in europe. it has one of the lowest overall unemployment rates in europe. it is one of the few countries that still had growth in the years past / is not deeply in recession.
Yeah, those are the perils of "socialism".
There's more. There's technical standards, procedures and laws accross europe for the storage, retrieval and processing of metadata and other information.
it's called ETSI Lawful Interception see: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception#Technical_d...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception#Europe
* http://www.etsi.org/index.php/technologies-clusters/technolo...
* http://webapp.etsi.org/WorkProgram/Report_WorkItem.asp?WKI_I...
* http://webapp.etsi.org/WorkProgram/Report_WorkItem.asp?WKI_I...
This has been in place much longer than the "data retention" directive.
germans generally like order very, very much. :)
the last 2 polls also had only 2 options. so for comparisons sake it will be better to leave it at that, i think.
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