"Keep in mind that wasn't an accidental difference. In Germany, the publishers that opted out of the scheme (and kept their presence in Google News) benefited from absence of those who didn't opt out, which created a motive for all publishers to opt out in a sort of tragedy of the commons situation. The Spanish lawmakers wanted to prevent that."

The legislation is an attempt to create a law mandated news cartel:

"In economics, a cartel is an agreement between competing firms to control prices or exclude entry of a new competitor in a market. It is a formal organization of sellers or buyers that agree to fix selling prices, purchase prices, or reduce production using a variety of tactics." (Wikipedia).

If they had been succesful the consequence would be that Spanish media consumers would have to pay more for their news. Fortunately it seems like they will not be succesful and hopefully Spanish consumers can use foreign media outlets that are not part of the cartel.

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on it's back, it's belly baking in the hot sun, beating it's legs trying to turn it'self over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

I believe the above quote speaks for itself...

If you look at:

Seattle demographics

in combination with the article you will see that the city is in fact more colored now than in 2000. The original poster is cherry picking statistics to prove his/her point. Seattle is less white now than in 2000. You could say that after a prolonged browning of the city it is now whitening slightly. The long term trend is however not clear.

I am also a bit confused by the article. It seems like Amazon is only hiring from Seattle itself and not the suburbs. Otherwise they would not employ 5-7% of the city population. Is that really true or is it another one of the authors mind tricks?

OP: "We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion."

You seem to be missing that the OP argues that we should abstain from offending people due to for example their religious convictions. I totally agree that threats of violence should be (and is in most countries) illegal. And I also agree that women are more likely to encounter threats of violence on the net. But if your fantasy friend in the sky and you believe that it is fine to kill homosexuals, apostates or whatever you should sure as hell expect others to ridicule your religion.

This is in effect an indirect tax. Buyers of non-zero emission cars are effectively paying for the loss that automakers make on the zero emission cars. It would be much more honest to tax them directly instead of letting the auto industry act as an intermediary. But then again: taxes and honesty are probably not words that one should use in the same sentence.

Amphetamines??? You should try midi-chlorians instead. Much more effective and with less side effects. Not counting the risk of acquiring a narcissistic personality disorder and walking around with a lightsaber killing everyone who disagrees with you...

Could you please document that older people call in sick more often? In my country it is actually the other way around. Young people tend to call in sick more frequently than middle aged people. And I have the numbers to prove it:

http://www.statbank.dk/statbank5a/selectvarval/define.asp?PLanguage=1&subword=tabsel&MainTable=FRA05&PXSId=155305&tablestyle=&ST=SD&buttons=0

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

- Jamie Zawinski

If you want to avoid the overhead of spawning new processes you might want to look into IPython Parallel:

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/parallel/

If you use that you can keep your "engines" (= processes) running to avoid the overhead of spawning processes. But the inter-process communication will still be slow (I believe they also use pickling) unless you use MPI for communication (which limits the datatypes that you can transfer and adds some extra programming overhead).

But spawning processes is very slow. And more importantly communication between processes means pickling and unpickling objects which in my experience can be a showstopper due to the performance penalty. I guess this is a consequence of the fact that the multiprocessing module is very general and can run on several nodes. So my question is:

Will Python get a fast parallellization module for CPU bound problems on shared memory architectures?

But multiprocessing is heavyweight. It is very expensive to launch new processes. Which leads to my question to Guido:

When will Python support lightweight threads for CPU bound workloads?

It ain't over till the fat lady sings...

Get your quotes straight (there are multiple versions of the "first they came..." story but none with muslims:-):

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

"For one, they've failed the address the perception that unions protect lazy workers at the expense of the productive ones."

That is not a perception but a fact. And at least in my old union they did it openly. I was employed at a public institution where part of the salary was fixed (based on seniority) and a minor part was individual. The individual part is however not negotiated between the employee and the employer but between a union representative and the employer (also for employees not in a union - effectively forcing people into the union). One of the negotiation tactics that our union representative used was to deny productive employees that the institution wanted to reward any increase in wage supplements since the union wanted the money spent on the low productivity employees.

Fortunately I left that workplace for another workplace where the unions are much less influential.