Perl was designed by people and for people who were fond of the Unix shell scripting syntax, all the unix tools, and the C language, which were the primary tools of coding unix in the old days. Unfortunately, Perl looks cryptic to anyone without a background in that sort of Unix environment. Most people don't learn unix shell scripting and C, before jumping into a scripting programming language. They jump straight into scripting language. As a result, Python has a huge advantage with this crowd. Then there is the issue of TMTOWTDI, which a lot of companies and programmers want to avoid these days.

This is why Python has become an industry standard language while Perl remains a tool for one-off hacks.

I really don't understand how retailers and manufacturers are still getting away with selling $700-800 laptops with those awful 1366x768 or 720p displays. A few times I was looking for a basic laptop with entry level CPU and memory, and a 14-15 inch screen with nice resolution at an affordable price at Fry's or BestBuy. But the sales people always direct me at loaded models that cost +1000 to get that screen.

Most departments in most fields are reluctant to hire their own graduates. Hiring your own graduates will simply lead to rehashing of the same old ideas and intellectual stagnation. The same type of discrimination against own graduates is observed in graduate school admissions. I often see the pattern that at many competitive schools they don't really like admitting their own graduates into PhD programs. It happens, but not that frequently.

No I don't. What do you propose? That all cars should also be "smart cars" which will not start without owners fingerprint for the sake of safety?

I suspect the ban on using Russian engines to launch the US military satellites is more of a posturing. Russian rockets and rocket engines are used mostly to launch civilian satellites.

I think the intent is to get more Russians to use Russia's GPS equivalent.

The sanctions and bans clearly will not work to defuse the Ukraine crisis. The Russian public has bought into Putin's nationalist rhetoric. Putin completely controls the political discourse in the mass media within Russia. This year, Kremlin increased pressure even on web based news, social networks, and blogs. Every Western sanction is met with a counter-sanction from the Russian side. The Russian economy and standards of living may suffer (some have serious doubts about the effectiveness of these sanctions), but I don't think they will make Russia back away.

Moreover, it's not clear what is the goal of the western sanctions as their goal is often amorphously described as "deescalate the situation in Ukraine". What does this mean? Russians think that annexation of Crimea is a done deal. Not just Putin, average Russians too. They certainly won't back away from that. As for the instability in east Ukraine, it's not clear how you prove who is escalating what right now? The locals in East Ukraine are certainly as pissed off at Kiev as it gets, specially after deadly Odesa clashes and the coup in Kiev. I don't think they need a lot of encouragement from Putin at this point.

The best way to defuse the crisis in Ukraine, is to help this country rebuild its democratic institutions and economy. While Ukraine is viewed as the victim in this dispute, its government must do more to accommodate the concerns of its Russian-speaking citizens in the East regions. For one, they should be allowed to elect their local government officials.

It's not about suspending GPS. It's about land based sites. Some kind of signal boosters I suppose.

I'd disagree. This is subjective of course. On my U-Verse dvr, I constantly have a backlog of 60-80 hours of shows. TV series, sports, animal shows, movies, travel shows, etc. I wouldn't have been aware if some of these even existed without taking occasionally time to "browse" what's on those 200 channels. In my view, the biggest problem with cable TV right now is not bundling, but the incessant commercials. A typical news program, sports, or TV series is loaded with commercials. The real content is like 70% of the total. Recording on DVR and skipping forward, is the only way to watch shows, though it's getting annoying to fast forward four-five times during an hour long show.

And why do you compare Putin with Hitler? Why does every authoritarian leader draw comparisons with Hitler?

Hitler rounded up millions of "undesirables", such as Jews, communists, and prisoners of war in concentration camps and had them murdered or starved to death. What was the figure, 10-12million people? He wrote that hideous book called Mein Kampf which was the manifest for everything he was going to do. I don't see any parallels with Putin here.

You don't know what you're talking about. Putin has been in the office of President of Russia or Prime minister for over 15 years. Is he authoritarian? yes. But next Stalin? Please.

By the time Stalin completed his first 15 years as the leader of Soviet communist party, he already managed to murder millions of Soviet people. Stalin's great purge of 1937, resulted in the murder of over 600,000 people while millions of people starved to their deaths in the Holodomor.

Wow, cry me a river over this. Let's expel all whites from the north american continents. Let's declare Kosovo a part of Serbia. Let's declare South Sudan a part of Sudan. Let's join the East Timor back with Indonesia.

Of course most countries will not recognize a vote by separatists. However, that does not make the vote less valid (see Kosovo). People should decide where they belong, not some nationalists in Kiev.

Indeed. Gregory has been posting hysterical anti-Russian garbage for months now, together with a guy called Greg Sattel. These two are the primary anti-Russian neo-con mouthpieces at Forbes.

You are wrong. There was an option to stay in Ukraine. Check your facts. Moreover, the Forbes article is garbage. The guy was posing hysterical anti-Russian garbage for months. The report said that _probably_ 30-50% of voters voted, with 50-60% voting pro-Russian. So why does the guy lowball his numbers? Forbes is the last place you should consult for the truth in international politics, by the way. It's a typical conservative, neo-con mouthpiece.