I used to think like Fahrbot-bot: Enforced whitespace is lame, and I'd like the creative freedom to just bang out one line of Perl when necessary. I now love programming in Python. (And felt this way after a week.) After using Emacs to edit lisp for six years, I've become accustomed to "magically" indenting everything to The Correct Place. The language doesn't require it, but the editor makes it trivial, and it's a huge win for code readability. The parens (and braces in other languages) can fade in importance, and become implied when reading a standard code formatting convention.

I tend not to notice the braces/parens in most languages, and rather depend on the notational convention of an indentation style. When code fits the convention, it's easy to read. Python merely enforces a convention which I would already want to use in nearly every case. Yes, I still wish it were easy to (sometimes) write one long line of something like I could in Perl or lisp, but since I rarely ever want to do that even in those languages, I'm willing to live with that. I wouldn't even call it a pain point, except for the fact that it makes it harder to do things like write toy implementations of a function, which I think I've wanted to do twice in three months.

One thing I love about Python, and which Perl doesn't do quite as prettily, is the list comprehension idiom. I find Python's syntactic sugar much easier to read, and it is the idiomatic way of doing a __lot__ of things.

#Perl:
@foo = map{ $_['a'] } @bar
#Python:
foo = [ b.a for b in bar ]

I used to think like Fahrbot-bot: Enforced whitespace is lame, and I'd like the creative freedom to just bang out one line of Perl when necessary. I now love programming in Python. (And felt this way after a week.) After using Emacs to edit lisp for six years, I've become accustomed to "magically" indenting everything to The Correct Place. The language doesn't require it, but the editor makes it trivial, and it's a huge win for code readability. The parens (and braces in other languages) can fade in importance, and become implied when reading a standard code formatting convention.

I tend not to notice the braces/parens in most languages, and rather depend on the notational convention of an indentation style. When code fits the convention, it's easy to read. Python merely enforces a convention which I would already want to use in nearly every case. Yes, I still wish it were easy to (sometimes) write one long line of something like I could in Perl or lisp, but since I rarely ever want to do that even in those languages, I'm willing to live with that. I wouldn't even call it a pain point, except for the fact that it makes it harder to do things like write toy implementations of a function, which I think I've wanted to do twice in three months.

The one thing I miss from Perl is the degree to which regular expressions are embedded in the language, and the ease with which one can use them. It's a little harder with Python, which I find frustrating at times.

One thing I love about Python, and which Perl doesn't do quite as prettily, is the list comprehension idiom. I find Python's syntactic sugar much easier to read, and it is the idiomatic way of doing a __lot__ of things.

#Perl:
@foo = map{ $_['a'] } @bar
#Python:
foo = [ b.a for b in bar ]

If you have been holding off on playing with Python because you love Perl, great. It's still a great language to work with, and the whitespace is not as bad to deal with as you might imagine. My friends use vim with it; I prefer Komodo. There are several other good editors as well.

Any terrorist that has to use the US Census Bureau to find a population center, as opposed to buying a map from AAA or using Wikipedia, is an idiot.

In contrast, my mother has taught high school french, italian, and spanish for at least a decade now. Her workload is insane. Not only does she have the normal hours of the day where she has to be on campus directly dealing with kids, she then gets to spend time reading and grading papers, as well as evaluate how well her lesson plans worked, and update them for the next time she teaches (or to adjust for faster/slower class progress). The net result is that she works at least twelve hours a day, often more, and regularly gets about four hours of sleep.

If you're teaching a class that requires grading of papers or has handouts. you get to create the material, make enough copies, teach it in class, read/grade all of the responses, and then repeat. God help you if you want to actually challenge your students with more than multiple choice, and have them write real sentences or prose. 30 students times 5 classes is 150 students' worth of papers to READ every day. How long would you spend on each? My teachers in high school, like my mother now, read their students' papers closely enough to be able to write corrections, and even write feedback on them. I imagine it's more than a minute per student spent correcting, and more than ten minutes spent per class evaluating the effectiveness of your curriculum and planning how best to ensure your students actually _learn_. So, that's another four hours on top of your "eight hour" day right there.

So, while teachers bring in some decent sounding dough, the amount of time they put into it depends a lot on the subject matter they teach and the degree to which they invest themselves in teaching well. (It's probably still a lot easier than being a sysadmin, though.)

I wish I'd read your comment before I decided to comment, as I found that very insightful. Thank you.

My bias: I don't own a firearm, don't plan to own one anytime soon, but I would someday like to, and when I do I would like to have a concealed carry permit, even if I do not plan to carry on a regular basis (and am unsure if I would at all). The history nerd in me feels strongly in support of the "shall not infringed" idea about guns.

Now, to answer your question. A lot of training, with mandatory annual range time or rounds fired. Practice makes perfect, and the more you hang out with people that value safety while armed, the more likely you are to incorporate that in your reflexes and actions. I believe that anyone looking to bear a gun should have similar training and upkeep of the skills of gun use and ownership. Here's the training I would like to have before I own a gun -- and who knows, a CC permit might even require more (I don't know, as I haven't looked):

• Three months of two (or more) days per week training at an accredited school in handgun proficiency, including both range time and personal time with instructors. (Obviously, veterans would already have much of this covered.)
• A course in using a handgun (or other weapon) for defense (self or home). I read years ago about a week-long course (?) where you learn things like room clearing, hostage rescue, etc and would love to take that. (I've since forgotten where it was that did this. Damn.)
• Two hours per month (or X hours per three months?) of range time.

I think this would be an admirable and effective way to ensure that an armed populace knows how to use their weapons both effectively and safely. I have a hard time reconciling that with the language of the second amendment and the views of our founding fathers, but I imagine they figured that an idiot with a musket was unlikely to be able to hit anyone, let alone several, and that the people who could afford a weapon tended to be those who would know how to use one.

I stand corrected. I have never seen more than one person ever complete the entire course in the same competition, so I didn't know that. Thanks for the clarification!

Did you even watch the same dubbed Ninja Warrior that I did?? Sure some of it had slapstick, because occasionally people would compete (for lulz) in a tuxedo or something, but once things got serious (or the serious competitors were on) I can't think of anything slapstick about it. Wipe-out vs Ninja Warrior is like comparing Jersey Shore to the Seven Samurai.

I disagree. Because there is never a guarantee of a winner (unlike Survivor), and quite often only 1-2 people make it to the final round (and then both fail), everyone going in is hopeful that they will conquer it. The competition is merely in terms of who can overcome the challenges faster... if at all. That "at all", and the fact that often the course is Too Hard, means that it really is a test of true athleticism. You're right that they are friends, but I don't think that colors their attitudes as much as you appear to think. If you or I were to make it three rounds in and then have a heartbreakingly close failure on the final round, I suspect we'd get the same condolences, and would get the same accolades if we won.

I've never actually seen two people complete the same course. I've seen at least one time when both remaining competitors were less than a second away from completing it.

God, this makes me want to watch the show, now. It's both inspiring to see these people do it, and frustrating when I realize that I'll never devote my life to that pursuit as tirelessly as they do.

Agreed. This is what I loved about the Japanese show: I could honestly root for every single competitor, and sincerely hope that they could win. Those challenges are HARD! I love the spirit of camaraderie they show towards one another, and that some people compete just to have fun.

That seems a bid disingenuous: I wouldn't want an impaired doctor operating on me, whether it was because he had drunk a half liter of scotch, smoked pot, or were high on amphetamines. That would be negligent practice, and it's already something that they can get sued for.

He didn't say that people smoked heroin, he said that they smoked opium - any Sherlock Holmes fan will know how common this was at one time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin says that Heroin is:

(emphasis mine).

I suspect that Trout007 has substantially more concept of where heroin came from than you, but now you know better.

DOTA started out as the "Defense of the Ancients" mod for Warcraft III ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients ). It basically had you control a hero, working in a team with some other players versus others. Just like CounterStrike started as a Half Life mod and grew, so did DOTA -- League of Legends is another game (spiritual successor?) that is basically similar. Past that I have no idea, other than that it appears to be very popular.

I'm certain that anyone who plays DOTA or League of Legends (or DOTA2) has lots if insight into the subtle differences (much as I could expound on the differences between Global Operations, Counter Strike, and Call of Duty multiplayer). For you, it's probably enough to know that it's a team-based RTS-like action game where you control your hero, level them up, and try to kill the opposing team's ancient in a manner that requires teamwork with two other people. :)

I find that I can't really tell the difference between high and low bitrates (or CD) when I'm driving. The road noise drowns out any imperfections, so I'm quite happy to just stream Digitally Imported (di.fm) all the time.

A Social Security card or a Passport are both documents should each be valid. I recommend the Passport, as the SS card should be kept safe(r).

Exactly. I really don't give a fig about basketball, likely as I don't understand it, and I found this talk (and slides) fascinating! I thought it was interesting to see how he could correlate players similarity by statistics, and then use that to expose cheaper versions of awesome players, or to show how your team is missing a certain skillset.

Now if only I knew what a paint protector was and why it's important. :)