So apparently some crybaby "libertarian" modded this down for exercising free speech?

You rolled several of your favorites together in that one, but you missed a few:

• Hillary Clinton
• Racist
• Benghazi

C'mon smitty, bring it on home. Wrap 'em all together into one nice package and tell us how this is the cherry on top.

You say that as if you could support it, yet so far you have been wholly unable to.

That is a strange way to say "because I believe it to be such".

You pretending that the Tea Party is anything more than an only-slightly-more radical and slightly-less-informed - and somewhat-differently-funded - branch of the GOP is ... amusing.

So if enough people vote against their own interests in the 2014 elections, we can then spend millions (if not billions) of dollars on an impeachment that has no chance of removing the POTUS? That should about do it for a good long time for the conservative movement, right there.

It appears you are trying to make a case that you read some small part of my comment. Would you like a biscuit or a bone in reward?

[sigh]

*gives up trying to reason. There's none so blind as those who don't want to see...

Those aren't issues, they're features. Lack of static typing (odd choice of words - you could say Java lacks dynamic typing) allows much sparser code and you don't have to waste time compiling. The downside is there's more chance of runtime errors, but the time you've saved probably makes up for it and hell, you've got time now to write those unit tests. Performance isn't Python's strong point, but there are lots of options. For example, if you want to parse XML, ElementTree has a fantastic API and is written in pure Python so you can read it's code, step through it with a debugger. If you want it to go faster you can swap it out for cElementTree, which has the same API but is compiled from C code.

Masterfully crafted after being purchased by lobbyists for the companies. The financial return of lobbying is massive -- more than making cool products people love.

We find firms lobbying for this provision have a return in excess of $220 for every $1 spent on lobbying, or 22,000%.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

That said, I think the nature of the parties in this instance is clouding /.'s judgment. Let's say it was a secure email provider who stored all data offshore, but was a US company. Would /. in general really be so willing to side with the Feds? I doubt it, and I see a lot of potential problems that could hurt real people as a result of this decision surviving appeals.

Municipal elections are what most politicians use to launch their careers for state and federal offices. They're generally pretty cheap, so ambitious wannabes use them to build name recognition. Then when they run for those more powerful positions, the donors and voters say "oh yeah, that guy" and give them money/votes. It's how the moral-majority types took over the Republican Party in the 1980s, and it's how the libertea-baggers are trying to take it over from them today. So in that sense, local elections are very important. (To say nothing of the fact that the matters decided by local government have a greater impact on the day-to-day lives of people than those made at the state or federal level.)

Perhaps, but any such exploration and the resulting tools have to beat the baseline of a decent text editor, a decent version control system, a decent scripting language, and starting to write code within a minute of deciding the project is ready to begin.

For a long-running project with many developers and other contributors performing repetitive or error-prone tasks, maybe it will be worth investigating, selecting and adopting some external tools to automate some of that work, at some stage in the project when you know where the pain points are. But if your development team aren't newbies, they will be perfectly capable of building their code manually at first, they will surely already know their universal Big Three tools very well, and importantly, they will just code up any basic automation on the fly as the project grows and the needs become apparent.

IME, that turns out to be a surprisingly tough standard to beat. I've seen many, many projects get bogged down in their own infrastructure because they felt they should use some type of tool and forced themselves to do it, not because they necessarily needed that tool or found it useful in practice. Of course good tools can be useful, and of course sometimes it is better to bring in help from outside the project rather than being too NIH about everything, but it's important to stay focussed on the goal and not to forget that tools are only means to an end.

You probably should be sorry. The fastest Geodes are antiques (I have two of them right here, whee.)

How do you know how long it was "flat" before you noticed it?

Visual Studio/Xcode casts Summon Spirits.
Spirit appears.
Spirit appears.
Spirit appears.
Spirit attacks Real Programmers.
Real Programmers attempt to save against arrogance... and fail.
Real Programmers have been frozen in time.

This must have been discovered by a Benz mechanic. Soda cans are far too proletariat for S-class owners.

I think you're proving my point about the black-and-white nature of how people regard free speech in the USA. See, I'm very much in favour of free speech, it's been a fundamental right of UK society now for longer than the USA has existed in its current form, and pretty much any UK citizen would be equally for it.

Where we differ is in nuance. The UK approach is a shades-of-gray one, where the right to speak whatever you want, no matter how hurtful to others, is actually counter-balanced by how much what you say hurts the target of your invective; and this in turn is counter-balanced by the importance of what it is that you're saying to society as a whole. There's a whole spectrum of things to consider when making a judgement, which is why the UK position is that if a free-speech issue comes up, it ought to be decided by a judge rather than a black/white hard-and-fast rule.

Now does this matter, in day-to-day life ? No. People say and do pretty much the same thing on both sides of the pond; but when a big issue comes up and a judgement has to be rendered, the courts take a more reasoned view than "Is this free speech ? Yes ? Ok then, feel free to ".

I'll ignore the idiotic purposeful misreading of the Fire thing...

Shouldn't there be something along the lines of

it hasn't taken much more than a text message to get inside Paris Hilton for years

By now?

Given that hotel keying tends toward assorted mag-stripe flavors, which are certainly more obscure than RFID/NFC(mag stripe readers and writers aren't terribly expensive or in any way controlled; but nobody is pushing to build them in to random consumer electronics); but which have only whatever testing the vendor gave them and security-through-obscurity, I'm not seeing why the security risks would necessarily be 'obvious'.

Yes, connecting anything to the network raises the stakes; but I'd be shocked if the existing systems are exactly flawless, even ignoring the human element of social engineering the front desk staff or the practice of finding the cheapest maids available and issuing them full access for room cleaning...

This will probably go poorly; but it might actually go poorly in a visible enough way that they have to fix it or risk embarassment/lawsuits, rather than just having it go poorly more or less forever.