He also seems to spend most of his time enriching himself with bad pop science books and TV appearances. Maybe he did some useful science early in life but at this point he is NOT a scientist to admire or aspire to be.

I was watching a TV show about Alaska, where some small town had their generator go out and they needed to fly in an engineer. In those tiny villages, the kind where an engineering degree means you can get a job somewhere else that can afford to pay you, remote monitoring and diagnosis is the only option they have. They had one guy in the town who had the keys to the building, knew to keep the fuel tanks filled, and could do some minor mechanical repairs to the system, but that was pretty much the limit of his capabilities.

Nobody in that town would be qualified enough to even understand those notices. Nobody there would likely know what software was being used, let alone visit the home pages of the company providing it. A town like that won't have the money to pay for monitoring services - they're going to be on a repair-only basis. And they're going to be the ideal consumers of a remote solution like the kind these firms are selling.

While this town may be a worst case scenario, it exemplifies the kinds of bad luck circumstances that would lead someone right into this risk, and CERT notices probably won't ever help them much.

I use Python both professionally and for fun (and C and C++ professionally) and don't get this impression at all. Major upgrades to shipped languages take time. The willingness to impose one-time incompatible changes for the sake of long-term improvements takes guts, and can certainly go wrong, but can very well be worth it.

As someone who worked in C and C++ pre-standardization, I recall (perhaps erroneously) that the new standards broke a fair bit of existing code, albeit in minor ways. And of course Microsoft's broken C++ compiler in Visual Studio 6 resulted in a vast amount of borken code when they finally caught up to the rest of the world.

That said, I haven't moved to Python 3 yet, although I believe all the libraries I really care about have now migrated. I tend toward late-adoption, though, and my sense of the Python community is that everyone accepts we are eventually going to move to 3. Big changes take years, so it's no surprise that lots of developers are still on 2.x. The real watershed will be when a few major libs (wxPython, say) drops 2.x support.

In contrast, my impression of Perl 6 is that it's the language of the future, and always will be. It appears so different from Perl 5 that it's a little weird the same name is being used, and it has mostly resulted in sucking the oxygen out of Perl 5 development.

Reading between the lines, it looks like it is a thin layer of mixed carbon and hydrogen with a structure that they have not yet properly characterized but which they have shown has the properties required for transparent electrodes in solar cells.

Specifically, they say the properties of the layer can be controlled by the properties of the polymer they start with, which suggests that it partakes in the polymer's nature, which would mean it is more than just a single layer of carbon atoms.

They may be being cautious and simply saying it is "graphene-like-enough" for this application, but having not fully characterized it may not want to claim it is "truly" graphene, which is a fairly vague term for a variety of single-sheet carbon materials that may have a variety of defects, in just the same was as "paper" is also fairly vague (from tissue to construction.)

This is true. But it is not a weakness of the language. And do not confuse "insane syntax" with what Perl is doing.

Perl holds the author responsible for using the correct syntax in the context of the author's intent. It does not hold the author's hand, as if they were some kindergartner just starting out. One of Perl's axioms is that the author must be allowed to do whatever he wants without regard to some imposed notion of what is reasonable, for who but the author can know what his intention is?

That means a lot of shitty scripts are written in Perl. But a lot of shitty verbiage is written in English. Neither language should be judged by the great volume of shitty work that has been done in it. Each language should be judged by the quality of the most elegant work that it can support. There has been some really elegant work done in Perl.

For critical work, Perl should not be used by programmers who do not yet know what they are doing. While it is a great language for studying things like Knuth's work on algorithms (TAOCP), it should not be used in mission critical applications until the student has mastered those studies.

And determining which programmers are sufficiently capable to be allowed to use Perl is a problem for the IT managers and software team leaders. It is not a problem with the language.

Don't try to use Perl in anything that is mission critical until you no longer need the training wheels.

The Bohr model is not an accurate description of atoms, so it's pointless to try to compare anything to it and claim you are comparing to actual atoms.

2. Not entirely. There are planets without stars, and there are stars which orbit stars (well, stars which orbit a barycentre between itself and another star, which may or may not be inside the other star).

"Republic" doesn't mean what you think it does. It has nothing to do with democracy. It simply means a country that is not ruled by a dynastic leader. That's it.

So both parties have an official policy of republicanism if they are not actively seeking to replace the president with a leader chosen by dynasty.

Your claims are not mutually exclusive. Labour have had some shady dealings in the past, as have the LibDems (but less so). Both Labour and the LibDems have not engaged in the anti-poor-people tactics of the Conservatives in levels anywhere near as great. This is evident in the cuts to public spending by the Conservatives (which hurts poor people most), the attacks on unions, and the spates of privatisation.

They have a ridiculously small turning circle, surprising acceleration, and a roomy, disabled-accessible interior.

Your comment about fat people is absolutely pointless, as you well know, and doesn't exactly reflect well on you.

Cabbies talk, you know. They hang out frequently and discuss the state of the traffic and the roads. They do this because they know it helps them to all be aware of such things. Google also doesn't have good historical data, whereas cabbies can tap into the knowledge of Londoners (themselves & their colleagues) who have lived there their entire lives. Google's data on utilisation is nowhere near as accurate as cabbies' as Google isn't driving these streets every single day - their data is simply not as granular as cabbies'. The way you spell "utilization" hints you might not know precisely of which you speak...

Google doesn't know that stuff, though. Google's map data is great - don't get me wrong - but it doesn't know about the fluctuations in traffic that the cabbies do. It doesn't know about that accident that happened 30 minutes ago, that the cabby saw earlier, or that small street which is marked incorrectly on Google Maps which is navigable. It also doesn't know what "That road of Essex Road where there used to be that pub called the Red Lion or Red Dragon or something" refers to, which is something plenty of cabbies would know, as their knowledge extends far beyond The Knowledge, and includes plenty of historical data for well-travelled routes.

So yeah - Google is great, but it's not up to the standard of even an average black cab driver.

Two wrongs don't make a right. That is no justification for acting like a muppet.

Well, to counter your story I've used black cabs on numerous occasions, and had great experiences. They were courteous, fast, knew the routes like they were channelling the gods of the A-Z, and were reasonably priced. So I guess we cancel each other out. Not to forget their cars are specifically designed for London's streets, and can fit 5 people in the back with ease.

London cab drivers can't exactly step up their game without insane amounts of investment - they're the best of the best. They already spend years studying to become a taxi driver, and they already know central London and most of the rest by heart. They already know where the traffic jams are at any given time of the day, and the current best route from where they are to where they need to be. I think they're scared this Uber nonsense will take their fares away, which they have worked insanely hard to even be in a position to serve, and bring the reputation of their profession down. There's no way Uber can compete with the quality of the black cab, or even probably price (if you factor in the length of route selected by an utter professional), but until people realise that, there could very well be a horrible time for the black cab drivers.