I've given up on humility, I'm smart, atleast relative to my environment. This has become obvious to me during my school years. I've never had to do homework or study before tests, because I'm smart. I know people who aren't dumb who have had to spend a lot of time studying.
It's not hard to know if you're smart or not, what's hard is knowing really how smart you really are. I'm probably not the smartest person on HN, I might very well be among the dumber ones? How would I really determine that? I have no good answer to that. But I am smart. You probably are, too, and the sooner you realize that and admit it openly, the better.
I like the second better because the capitalization makes it easier to read.
"HELP BUBBLE CAN SAVE THE DAY"
vs.
"Help Bubble can save the day"
I didn't realize your product was called Help Bubble when I read the text on the first website and I was confused. I thought maybe there was a can of bubbles that needed help saving the day.
I can't have any sympathy for them in a case like this.
If Microsoft felt it was a victim of software patents, then it would be lobbying Congress and industry to abolish software patents. Instead they make rumbly noises at Linux over supposed patent violations, and continue to amass patents. "For defense only." Yeah, right.
I'm not aware of Microsoft, or any other large patent-holding tech company, being known for advocating against software patents. Microsoft certainly has the research dollars available to show harm to itself or the industry, if that's the case. Yet they don't do that.
So Microsoft must believe that, on the whole, they're better off with software patents than without. So I have zero sympathy for them.
Unfortunately Microsoft still benefits from software patents. In fact, Microsoft benefits from losing a few hundred million dollars each year in software patent cases.
Microsoft is a big monopoly that has a lot to fear from startups. Startups are the companies that have to negotiate the software patent minefield. Keeping the minefield dangerous benefits the powerful established player.
The ideal thing for Microsoft would be to increase the craziness and lose a billion dollars a year to obviously non-innovative software patents. That would really discourage innovation and inventions and keep the position of the largest monopoly in the business secure.
Our software patent system really only hurts and restrains small businesses and actual inventors. Big business that wants to block innovation is the beneficiary.
I'd really like the exact opposite. The sooner every company supporting patents is hit with lawsuits and the sooner we get to the situation where noone can publish any code safely, the more chances there are for patents to be rejected. I hope that someone will emerge one day with a collection of patents for base Windows, Unix and Mac functionality, successfully enforce it and refuse to license. One can dream...
Well - they don't have unlimited resources. It might be just some loose change the first time. Losing the lawsuit a couple of times wouldn't actually go unnoticed. Especially if they would appeal all of them two times.
The data validation is so you can display a nice error message. To protect the database, you need to use prepared statements instead of mysql_really_really_try_hard_to_quote_the_string_or_something.
In the particular case of integer ids, however, can't you just make sure what's being passed is an integer? Similarly, for a 'simple' username, check against "^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$"?
Casting the ID to an int (like you should do) will make any non-numeric strings into 0. If your ID is 0 you can assume an attack and give such a message. With PHP you should be using mysqli_ functions instead of mysql_ variants as they protect against multiple queries executing in one mysqli_query() call.
I do agree prepared statements are the way to go at least 90% of the time.
"Angry"? IIRC he said they'd clearly copied it and that he'd be pissed if they were using it in a directly competing product. He also acknowledged that there's hardly a better visual metaphor for representing a collection of books.
