First, a language is more than just a tool; it's an entire ecosystem. Writing working code in a new language -- learning the syntax -- isn't too tough for most people. But beyond that... well, just remember that every task can be accomplished in many different ways (sometimes using core libraries, sometimes using 3rd party APIs, and with many different approaches to implementation), and you aren't going to have a clue when you're new to a language. Even with languages that are only relatively newly popular (like Ruby) there are often multiple libraries offering similar functionality that you want to include in a new project, and it's quite hard to know which is better until you've used them for a while.

The benefit of someone with experience in a given language is that they'll already *know* about the weird pitfalls and bugs in specific core libraries, bugs in specific versions of this or that, the best library to use for threading, or HTML scraping, or PDF generation, etc. etc.. The syntax is a fairly small part of what you need to be an effective developer in a new language (being a developer also involves estimating effort for tasks, debugging, doing security analysis, optimizing/scaling, etc. -- all things that are doable if you know the language "ecosystem", but not possible just knowing the syntax.

Second, existing code base and existing developer experience mean that even if Python is a better fit for a new task, and you could do it in Python in 10 minutes, you may still have to use Java because most of the other guys are "Java developers" and they're going to need to maintain it.

Another factor is that diseases evolve.

Every infected person -- even if they're a healthy child who will probably be fine after a bit of misery -- is a little disease factory and laboratory. Some of the virus they produce will be the same as what they caught. Some of it will be slightly different. Some of the different strains will be the same, or less potent/communicable/etc.. Some of them will be worse, or even much much worse.

And another hint for the grandparent poster: not every child is in good health when they get a given disease. Did you have any classmates who were out all the time due to health problems? Did you pass on your measles or rubella to any of them? Or hell, just pass on your germs to a newborn infant, or a pregnant woman, etc..

The sad thing is that *yes*, of course there are large numbers of parents around the world who will see their child's first signs of autism in the first few days after a vaccine, and many of those parents will be completely convinced that the vaccine did it. "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" is how most people think.

And those poor parents will try all kinds of quackery, and develop a drastic distrust of actual scientifically-based medicine, and simply not understand that autism generally shows up in early childhood, and vaccines are during early childhood... so simply by normal chance, we're guaranteed a percentage of austistic kids who will have their first clear signs immediately after a vaccine.

Listen people, thinking that X was caused by Y simply because it happened soon after, and treating your child's autism via "trying things" until something seems to work... you are doing *shitty*, flawed science, and you are probably going to do serious harm to your child. Please take the time to learn from people doing actual, valid science.

Ditto; it takes some force and persistence, but given enough time I can even get it through the tea strainer.

The result looks great as cupcake frosting!
Note: looks can be deceiving.

Checking her cellphone messages, unfortunately -- without paying attention to traffic, or the safety of her location.

Sadly, her death could have been easily avoided if she had simply kept her attention on traffic as long as she was exposed to it.

One useful tip -- it helps a lot if you bike in a group, because you're more easily spotted; i.e., you're relative safe if your kids are with you (and dressed in bright clothing), because collectively you can be just as visible as another car.

If you live in Europe, you need to extend the conversion a bit to cover the efficiency range of many of the cars here.

My 3 year old Peugeot averages 4.5l/100km (and I live in hilly terrain):

>50mpg = 4.7l/100km

I live in France, and 2 years ago I bought a used diesel Peugeot 206 -- it's looks good, it's powerful enough for all normal purposes, the diesel fuel is significantly cheaper here, and even though I use it mostly for short hilly drives, I average 4.5 l/100km -- that's something like 52 mpg.

I admit that I get a kick out of telling that to folks who paid a lot of money in the US for hybrids.

I live in a small rural village in central France. Two weeks ago the owner of a small photo shop in a nearby town asked me for help -- he had a customer who had dropped off film to be developed, and no place in France developed Kodachrome anymore... so he needed me to help him call Dwayne's Photo in KS, and give them his credit card details in English (thanks for your help, Krystal). It definitely struck me as odd at the time that the one place in the world he'd found to develop this film sounded like a tiny operation, but obviously his research was good....

There's a whole world out there, with Kodachrome film scattered throughout -- not everyone has an American living nearby who can help them make the call. I wonder what kinds of other calls they're fielding now.

Oh, come on now -- you want to ruin it, just for a moment of making yourself feel smart on Slashdot, of all places?

If everyone's peeking over, they'll be forced to raise the wall...

But we already have this info.

And that should be flagged as an alteration to its face -- is that what you're arguing?

Well, that's useless then. Violas are expensive -- even if you get a cheap used instrument that won't keep its tuning, has horrible tone, etc... it's still probably going to run you more than a hundred bucks. The good ones run into the thousands, of course.

Oh, wait -- did you mean "voilà"?

If RedHat doesn't want to share their code, then they should build their own OS, instead of just working on the pre-existing huge resource that is Linux/GPLed code. See how that works? They agreed to CentOS-style reuse of their work in exchange for THEIR for-profit reuse of decades worth of OTHER people's work; that's the price of the GPL, and they pay it willingly, because what they get is so valuable.

And speaking of cynicism: anyone stop to think that maybe some overaggressive RedHat executive with a suitcase full of cash is behind Lance's disappearance? Follow the money: CentOS looks unreliable ==> RedHat cashes in....

If not for religion, in many of those wars there'd have been no soldiers.

This is one of the big reasons why religious societies have survived so well, historically -- as king, if the deity/deities are your side, you can justify even asking children to fight for your cause (expanding land and resources), and you can convince your poor subjects to fight *to the death* for reasons that IRL don't actually justify it.

[I'm over-simplifying, of course, but think about it a bit....]

Exactly right, like how explaining that "Mommy went shopping for your presents when she claimed she was out grocery shopping, and Daddy wrapped them behind a closed bedroom door, misleadingly wrote 'from Santa' on the tag and then put them under the tree after he was sure you were asleep" is so much more more complicated than "Santa brought them, using magic."

Occam's razor, ladies and gentlemen.

How does the magic work? Oh, uh, it simply works.