Monopoly is certainly best as an out-of-the-box game. You can't do much at all if you leave everything in the box.

I'm distracted from the whole argument by this idea that two standard deviations above the mean isn't that great. In fact, it puts you well within the top 4% of the population (assuming a gaussian distribution). Is that how smart they are or how smart they think they are?

There's an even more basic misunderstanding if he thinks Linux is somehow responsible for an OpenBSD project.

foo == "constant" will not throw an exception. It does not coerce anything. If foo is not a string, it will return false.

The bytes type does have isalpha(). At least in 3.2.3. It really does.

You can't search bytes for 'A' without thinking about encodings because encodings matter. You can search bytes for b'A'.

They have added isalpha() to bytes. They do assume it is ASCII if it's in the ASCII range.

If you want to compare bytes with str, you can do the encoding if you know what you want. The language will refuse the temptation to guess.

You can turn a quoted string into a bytes object: by decoding it.

If the source is UTF-8, it won't have errors. Errors are, by definition, not UTF-8. The parser will refuse the temptation to guess what encoding you meant.

This is a Python article! Of course somebody has to complain about whitespace! When did you ever know a Python article to not start an argument about whitespace?

Nuclear still looks good compared to water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

I believe a properly administered git mirror will do everything the GP wanted, except for testing the backups (which isn't git's problem) and the "2-sided crypto-hash compare" because, in my amateurishness, I don't know what that is. I do know that git does cryptographic hash checks on pull and push. I don't know exactly what checks are done when. I didn't know that "git clone" didn't do those checks until today and it seems that the KDE folks didn't either â" but, hey, we all do now. (From the update, "git clone --mirror" is what failed, but I believe the "--mirror" part is incidental. Should have been "git pull --all --force" as far as I know in my amateurishness.)

I see other folks are less keen on discussing these issues than making condescending remarks about how to do backups. The update to the article goes in to a fair amount of detail about what they didn't do and why. It's almost as if they did think about these things.

What is this "git --mirror"? It's in the summary but not the original article. There are different git commands that have the --mirror option and they work differently.

My simple experiment, with an old version of git, shows that "git clone" succeeds whether or not you specify --mirror, that "git pull" doesn't have a --mirror option (maybe because I'm out of date but http://linux.die.net/man/1/git-pull doesn't show it either) and "git push" fails (hangs, in fact) if it tries to push a corrupt blob.

A discussion about whether you should use the safe method for backups wouldn't be very interesting because of course you should. The issue here is that they didn't know they weren't doing integrity checks and they may not be the only ones.

Cloning new repositories rather than pulling to existing ones sounds risky to me. If that's what they were doing I don't know why. A forced pull ("git pull --force") will keep old branches and a reflog and so on. It will also, as it happens, abort if an integrity check fails. So this seems like good practice. But I haven't seen any discussions of good practice in backing up git repositories and I'll excuse anybody not knowing the clone operations didn't do the integrity checks. (Especially if they also saved tarballs, whatever the problems with those may have been.)

I vouch for the parent. I checked the man pages and I don't see this behaviour documented. Those who think reading the documentation would have made the lack of integrity checks clear can easily point to the place it's documented. Then we can discuss whether a competent admin should have found it.

(Note: I read the latest article, and they did have backups. So any posts about them trusting one tool and not having backups are irrelevant.)

Yes, you can override the no-cache headers in Squid. Use a refresh pattern and ignore or override the headers the server sends to defeat the cache:

http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/refresh_pattern/

MAC address

Wegener knew the continents were moving, and collected a huge amount of evidence. Wegener didn't know why they were moving, but neither did anybody else. Wegener also failed to produce a cure for cancer and was hopeless at averting the Second World War. He did make the mistake of producing half-baked arguments for why the continents were moving, and getting his figures wrong on the rate of drift.

Geologists rejected his model because they decided to argue with Wegener, instead of continental drift. They proved Wegener was wrong and somehow thought that the whole problem of continental drift had gone away. They also applied special pleading, because they didn't know why the continents were rising (or they would have eroded away by now) or where the land bridges came from. According to the scientific method, they should have considered continental drift based on the evidence and the evidence should have been overwhelming. This is a classic example of human weakness in the face of a disruptive new idea.

I think it's very rare in Silicon Valley that an otherwise deserving businessman loses out because they're black. Rather, the deficiency is in the lack of deserving minority businessman in the first place. That's a social and cultural issue, and may not even be a problem. Not every culture needs to have equal representation in all fields; that's one of the ways in which cultures are different.

From over here, it certainly looks like a problem if Americans whose families have been in America for generations are still pushed into different societies and cultures according to skin color. Who says "African American" has to be the culture with quaint differences from Americans with the opportunity to succeed?

"Harmony with international trends" is a particularly insidious phrase, isn't it? Not harmony with international reality. Most countries don't have laws like this. But they're thinking about it, or will be when we send the boys round, so you'd better do what we say if you know what's good for you.