> A good hat dog is as illusive as it is tasty.

That's a fact, but it can be a head cover or food, not both!

> Ah, denial

Cool intro, bro!

> So it's not [Guido's] problem that [Python] sucks.

Were your parents eaten by Python or something? Calm it down a notch! Here's some facts about the projects that I know something about:

1. sgmllib was built into the Python 2 (which I mention in case you thought it was an external library). It existed solely to be used by the HTMLParser module, and as such it never fully supported SGML, making it useless for its stated purpose. Moreover, it's so absurdly trivial to port to Python 3 that I did it for the feedparser project.

2. BeautifulSoup relied on HTMLParser, which relied on sgmllib. That could be overcome but the author, Leonard Richardson, doesn't enjoy working on BeautifulSoup:

   Beautiful Soup is a hobby that I don't really enjoy and that's similar to the work I do all day. It's competing against other hobbies and committments I have, hobbies and committments that are more enjoyable and significantly different from my day job.

   He also notes that BeautifulSoup has been surpassed by other libraries, and recommends using those instead. It's no reflection on Python 3 that a library you used to use is not in active development.

3. I ported feedparser to Python 3 over the course of a week. It weren't no thang.

> If you're using Python for anything important, start working on your exit strategy.

I'm sorry Python made you cry, but I really do bristle that you hoisted up feedparser to support your sarcasm and hyperbole, particularly since you clearly have no idea what you're talking about in these three instances (and I think GooberToo handily dealt with some of your other points).

OP clearly has an agenda.

> How about checking within seconds of an update?

No cigar. For whatever advantages it may have, NoSQL's tradeoff is that it's only eventually consistent. You can't update the database and get nationwide replication immediately.

Come to think of it, maybe they're already using a NoSQL database. That'd explain why that guy was added to the no fly list over the Atlantic. He was probably blacklisted well in advance, but the database wasn't updated until he was already on the plane.

OP is correct, people will likely go with whatever is suggested by the government, even given the chance to review and modify it. Dan Ariely points out this effect in the context of organ donor percentages across multiple nations in his TED talk. I also think that Intuit is, though admittedly biased, correct (at least insofar as the company was quoted correctly in the summary).

But what I want to know is, by what metric do you determine the average case? 95% of the time the government's calculations are accurate? 99%? 99.9%? The census.gov Population Clock estimates that there are 308 million people in the United States, and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics currently claims that the employment-population ratio is 58 percent, which I assume translates to about 179 million people who'll be paying income taxes.

If the error rate is 1%, just short of 2 million people will have to correct mistakes in their government-provided taxation proposals. If the error rate is 0.1%, it'll be just shy of 200,000 people.

I agree in principal that taxes could be streamlined, but I would want to see some hard numbers after a trial run before deciding that the government was doing a good job (and I would want to see a comparison with the current error rate, as well as hard numbers on the Intuit-assisted error rate).

I agree, it's time to switch to the Unix password entry scheme. No feedback is good feedback!

Intel announced yet another delay for Tukwila, the next generation Itanium

Please tell me that's not an actual product name. (apologies)

The resource isn't "Not Found", it's "Gone". HTTP 404 is inappropriate in this instance.

Likely the best solution will be to ensure that people are notified first. If you're receiving a large number of hits, replace the content with a single RSS item that has a guaranteed-unique guid for every single request (say, based on the request time). This way, with each request, people will receive a "new" item that will display as unread, reminding them to unsubscribe from that particular feed.

After some amount of time, start returning HTTP 410 for all requests.

> force a bunch of stupid "notes" down the show-runner's throat ("Hey, can you bring in a sassy robot?

Hey, Bender made Futurama!

The editors gave a hat tip to Anonymous Coward?!

Obviously he was referring to Winamp HTML playlists being the first five pages of hits while searching Excite or Dogpile for your favorite artist/song.

...and a grammar checker. Its a shame.

I'm really surprised that with all the users they had, they are so quick to say "everything is gone and we're giving up"

Considering how complete and unrecoverable the loss is, they have no idea who their users are. The accounts would have to be recreated from scratch, but who would try? Their users have no reason to ever trust them again. Journalspace would have a difficult time wooing back their original users, and no new user would seriously consider using them.

Bowing out is the only recourse, but I'm glad they're considering releasing their source code.

With the ever-increasing amount of user data being stored on centralized servers, the research into anonymized data and de-anonymization algorithms, and the consistent loss of data due to human error, I expect personalized spam will become more and more prevalent (in whatever medium we use).