I think a more likely outcome is something like the patent pool that was forced into place by the US government around the 1920s to avoid a situation where, basically, no company could build a plane without infringing another company's patents. Otherwise, sooner or later, Android will be in trouble, but so will Apple and all other US companies.

Seriously, if you think the potential problem is in mud etc in your gutter get rid of the mud etc in your gutter! As others have said, it's vanishingly unlikely that you have a radiation problem, but getting your drainage to work properly will reduce all sorts of other risks, from bad smells and overflowing waste pipes to various insect breeding grounds.

The overwhelming proportion of OSS users, and even OSS enthusiasts, never contribute to OSS, so the whole premise of the claim seems flawed to me.

There are idiots on all sides, and maybe sometimes I'm one of them. But, in this particular case, it's not a question of "world view". If you take a world view in the sense of looking at the world as a whole, the whole of American politics is shifted to the right. That's not a statement about "world view", it's a truth claim that can be validated or falsified by looking at the evidence, eg the sort of policies held by "left wing" American parties and how the compare with the policies of "right wing" parties elsewhere.

I'd respectfully suggest that your "world view" simply ignores where the rest of the world is on these issues. Rather than comparing democrats, republicans, Fox or CNN with some baseline derived from worldwide trends, it uses a baseline based on some definition of "the American Way" or something. If you only compare America with itself, you magnify the differences within America. If you stand back and view the range of mainstream American views from a worldwide perspective, all those American views seem to bunch on one end of the global range. That's all the post that started this was saying.

You may disagree, and that's absolutely fine. But if you want to make that argument, show us were, for example, any mainstream American party wants to spend more on public healthcare than the current French, "hard right" administration, or which mainstream American party is arguing for five weeks a year of paid vacation per year (also in France), or for a legally binding 35-hour working week (the whole of the EU), or... Again, it's not a world view thing, it's a "what does the evidence say?" thing.

If someone here claimed that computers ran on steam and doughnuts, would 1000 people saying "That's wrong!" prove systematic bias?

Of course comments like this suggest that some other system has benefits! What exactly are you saying - that the rest of the world should understand that "America is best in every possible way imaginable" is the only comment that is welcome? My experience of discussing all sorts of subjects with Americans in all sorts of contexts is that the answer is generally "yes". No criticism of any sort is welcome from elsewhere, and if you break that rule everything you say forever more is written off because you "hate America." This is rather depressing, and also rather self-defeating.

Europe (and most of the rest of the democratic world) is far more left-leaning than the US, which was exactly what

There is not a single media organisation in the United States that espouses any kind of opinion that's even remotely "left of center"

was saying a few posts above. If you take the world as a reference, it's hard to find anything remotely mainstream in the US is that is left of centre by world standards. That's not an America-hating statement. It's as close to a factual statement as it is possible to get in political broad brush strokes.

Try translating the above few posts into the realm of IT and you might see the problem. It goes something like this:

A: Android has very little market share
B: Um, no, that isn't true
A: AAAAGH, YOU HATE ME!!!

and then you mod up A.

I'm a European and, from where I'm sitting, the problem isn't cultural bias on either side. It's the way any criticism of any aspect of American culture results in "individuals, like you, generally believe they're far more civilized (excuse me--civilised) and above such things".

Suggesting that America is far to the right compared with most other countries isn't about hating America. It isn't even necessarily a bad thing. It's a simple observation. Most of the policies of American democrats look moderate-right in a European context. The current French government is hard right by European standards, despite being more interventionist and more wedded to the public sector than any American politician I have ever heard. Nationalising popular music, anyone? Imposing a legal quota for French music played on private radio stations? Government purchases of old cars about every second year? Social charges that are over a third of income for most people? Five weeks statutory vacation a year plus a dozen national holidays? How much of this is in the Democrat manifesto?

So when right-leaning Americans talk about Democrats as if they are virtually communists, it really is very hard for anyone outside America not to burst out laughing.

I tried really hard to talk myself into Python a few months ago. Bought and read several books, wrote some code... and then discovered that the 2.6/3.0 thing is still a mess, with half the libraries on each side of this enduring divide that the Python community insisted at the time would never exist because the Python community would never have a legacy code problem because, well, it just wouldn't. AFAICS this disaster came about because the most important thing was not to do a single thing the Perl way. Unfortunately, excellent backwards compatibility (as in "works across the decades") was one Perl feature that really was worth copying.

I develop on Linux. The rest of my organisation uses Macs. After wasting several hours trying to get a very simple Python program to run unmodified across both platforms (PIL being the specific problem) we gave up and went back to a mix of older technology, all of which works perfectly across platforms. It's a pity, because Python looks really cute in theory, but in practice it was just an anagram of "long day", at least for our use case.

So how about Emacs/XEmacs, which was arguably the first great open source fork? Both projects are still around, but I don't get the impression that the fork (XEmacs) has run away with the ball by any stretch of the imagination.

Any chance someone could explain how this works in Florida at present? I'm trying to work out what the point would be of alcohol testing if anyone who is likely to be over the limit can refuse to take the test...

The first commercial ARM OS, in the mid-80s. It booted in a couple of seconds (often from ROM), had co-operative multitasking, anti-alised fonts and booted in a couple of seconds.

> Having seen a fluent southern brazilian portuguese speaker effectively
> navigate the baja peninsula, I know you're overstating your case.

I don't think so. I live in France, in a region with many Spanish immigrants. The French idiomatic expression for "Massacre the French language" is "To speak French like a Spanish cow". In other words, speaking Spanish loudly with a bit of French vocab doesn't cut it, at all.

There's a huge difference between "navigating through" a country and engaging with it. I'm sure your anecdote is true. I'm also sure that fluent Portuguese is of very little use if you want to fill in government forms or even understand the news on the radio. (We have a lot of Portuguese migrant workers here.) I'm reminded of an observation by a colleague working with international youth teams that a Swiss German who says he doesn't speak a language probably knows it better than an American who says he is fluent.

> but that doesn't mean that working in one language and (more importantly)
> understanding the descripting mechanics of it won't dramatically
> help you with another.

Of course! People who master two natural languages pick up other languages much quicker. But the key is "master". Knowing how to order a beer in ten languages doesn't equip you to do anything other than order beer. And knowing how to put a button on a screen in ten programming languages isn't very useful either.

I'm sure that experience of Perl, Lisp, assembler and other languages helped me to pick up C++ faster than would otherwise have been the case. But the differences matter as much as the similarities, and to get the most out of a language you need to embrace rather than work around those differences.

For example, nothing in any other OO language I have used prepared me for what you have to do to get a container with a superclass type in C++, or for the fact that the compiler will happily accept code that is going to throw away all the subclass functionality. I could have worked around that in various ways, but I think finding out what was really happening made me a better C++ programmer.

I can do lookup tables using STL maps in C++, and then my C++ feels just like Perl hash tables. But I'm realising there's a good reason that C programmers use enums in some places. And so on.

> Once you know a paradigm, picking up a new language under that paradigm will
> be just "yet another language", and you can learn one in a week (or 7 in 7
> weeks). Of course, it will take more time to actually become fluent in language
> specific idioms, standard libraries etc, but those are not rocket science either.

I know people who take the same approach to natural language. After all, Spanish and Italian are very very similar, aren't they? The reality with natural languages is that "all languages are the same" thinking enables you to abuse several cultures without actually understanding any of them.

And I think that to a large extent the same thing goes for programming languages. For example, if one of your "paradigms" is "object-oriented", does learning Smalltalk really prepare you for making best use of OO in Java or C++? Or vice versa? The inventor of Smalltalk and OO certainly doesn't think so.

I spent some time a while back trying to explain Scala to a Java programmer. His response was "It's just like Java." Well, Scala *is* just like Java, as long as you ignore the huge and central features that are not like Java. When I started to show him those features, generally in a "replace a page of code with one line" sense, his response was "I don't like it", and that was the end of the conversation. That, in practice, is what "learn 7 languages in 7 weeks" looks like.

My defining experience in this context was observing a government contractor whose preferred language was FORTRAN, who was told he had to code in Lisp. I would not previously have believed that it was possible to write Lisp as if it was FORTRAN, but that contractor proved me wrong. And, to be fair, I find that I have to make a conscious effort not to write C++ as if it is Lisp, eg "everything on the stack and screw the efficiency".

"7 languages in 7 weeks" only works if you stick to programming with the features that can be found or kludged in just about every language. Nowadays that's going to mean procedural code with loads of variables and a bit of OO for accessing libraries. It works, but it's a recipe for terrible, terrible code. But, hey, it will be equally terrible in 7 different languages!

I'm holding out for Quantum Google, which displays instantly every single web page that does and could ever exist. That way I'll never need to search for anything ever again!