Yeah, I run Fedora...

When the question is "How is this a new problem?" in internet related discussions, the answer is always "Because pre-internet, it was so annoying to do, that nobody did. Nowadays, everybody can do so in no time".

Some laws are based on assumptions on how things work, and when things stop working that way, the laws break..

It's like encryption: RSA (for instance) is assumed to be secure, because it is damn annoying to factor large numbers into large primes. When that assumption breaks, the algorithm breaks.

There are always two ways to view these cases: internetophiles think that things that was possible offline should continue to be possible online, internetophobes think that things that was possible offline should continue to be possible offline. In this case, should fair use of written works continue to work like it already does, which might mean sacrificing the journalistic profession, or should the journalistic profession (which, unlike record executives, is an important one) be saved, which would mean making fair use in written text work like it already does in music and films (where it's called "sampling", and requires explicit permission).

I do think he's wrong, but I would never agree to debate the issue with him, because he has some pretty good arguments to use...

No.

One advantage of using Javascript is that it doesn't already have a standard library that can do anything for you. This is a feature, since Glib can do those things for you already: if you mix too much, you'll run into inconsistencies (example: Gnome's virtual filesystems are really neat, and if your application uses Gio for file access, Gnome's virtual filesystems will be completely transparent. If you use Python's open(), everything will break). This is the kind of stuff everybody learns the hard way: by using a language without a built-in standard library, people can't do that mistake.

Another is obviously that all web developers "know" javascript, which some hope will bring more developers to Gnome.

Y is a vowel in Swedish too. And it just like GP says about it being able to act as a vowel in German, it can act that way in english too, like in "why".

Would that be their new iResurrect product I've been reading about?

I don't have a problem with girls, really - it's girls who have a problem with me.

Yeah, totally not the same: I can pretty much ignore my linux servers for weeks, and they still keep serving my every request.

16px * 16px * 256 colors = 65536 favicons. A lot of them looks like shit.

Typing "number of companies united states" into my firefox awesomebar takes me to http://www.manta.com/mb, which claims it has "over 13 million company profiles for businesses in the United States." I think there may be an additional company or two in Europe, Asia and Oceania, and there might be a few non-commercial websites.

Not all of those has a web page, and not all of those who do has a favicon, but...

While I don't know many German engineers, I've met plenty of German computer geeks at conferences. There are definitely some that don't speak English (or refuse to), and even more who've got... interesting pronunciation.

But I thought it would be obvious that I'm making fun of stereotypes in grandparent post. The last time I was in Germany, I kept trying to order food in German, but everyone just kept answering me in English when they heard my horrible German - I'm not dumb enough not to understand that if the immigrants who own pizza places speak English, engineers probably do too.

I'm not so sure "xenophobic" is the right word here, since I've lived all my life (except for the last 4 months) in a Swedish city that's pretty much founded by SAAB Aerotech, and parts of the A380 were engineered in their offices in that city.

Being European, I would strongly advice against buying an Airbus.

Trust me. You do not want to go French. You do not want to have to contact the French for support.

There's one thing that's worse, though: going half French, half German. You do not want to rely on something half built by French, who, due to them being French, won't speak anything but French, and half built by Germans, who due to being German will speak German, as well as English that really is as poor as Hollywood says it is when they make fun of the Germans.

It always comforts me to fly Boeing, when I know that the engineers could at least explain to each other what they were doing.

Your confusing this with the private sector.

This is the concept of overhead.

If we're only talking about the string formating, it's my opinion that the new way makes sense: I, personally, think of what the % operator does not as an operator that takes two arguments, but as a string that has "stuff" done with it - doing "stuff" to the string by calling one of it's methods makes sense. The new formating strings looses C compatibility, but on the other hand gains C# compatibility, so it's not like they invented a brand new syntax themselves.

It also frees the programmer from having to remember a cryptic one-letter name for the type of an object, when the exact object type is pretty much irrelevant in other places of the language. The MySQLdb module, and it's ideas about how to escape parameters in a safe way, is an excellent example on why C-style string formating is a bad idea.

There is also some new, fancy stuff that can be done with the new operator, that should increase code's readability: the example given in the relevant PEP (which doesn't work yet) of typing "Today is: {0:a b d H:M:S Y}".format(datetime.now()), for instance, looks pretty nifty.

It is, and has been for a long time, the Python Way to use English instead of cryptic characters. It is, for instance, perfectly possible to replace all != with is not. And that's not even mentioning the significant whitespace, which means you'll have to add at least one (but, if you follow the Python guidelines, four) characters for each line you want to be part of the subblock, instead of just a character to start the block and one more to close it.

If you don't want to write any more characters than you have to, go back to Perl - that's really what it shines at.

I know the above paragraph makes me sound like a dick, but the fact that we have all these languages around, all having completely different design philosophies, is a Good Thing, which not only lets us pick our favorite language among all those available, but also works as a sort of evolution, where language developers steals the good ideas from the competitors, and all of them end up kicking ass.