Some people wear black nail polish for the same reason that Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks: because black goes with everything.

If you're as fashion-impaired as I am, it's useful to stick with something that you know will work. Dressing with some modicum of sense is a courtesy to others.

Actually, I live outside California.

Ah, but "competitive" is not the same as "useful".

How much python do you need to know to be a useful programmer? The answer to that is: more than every python programmer I've ever met.

Worse than that, it gives Americans a false sense of security where none exists.

I disagree. Air travel in the United States has never been safer. Exactly none of that safety is due to the TSA, but the sense of safety is (at least in part).

Still, the problem remains, that Pike is no Torvalds.

Well, they've both had only two truly brilliant ideas in their respective careers and both have severe attitude problems. The only substantive difference between the two is that Pike is older, so his brilliance per unit time rating is lower.

Don't worry, Linus' day will come.

[...] that's mainly because most of my time is spent on systems that are designed to live for 15-20 years.

I would have thought that was an excellent reason not to roll your own language.

Is there an industry standard language out there that does the same thing as Swift (is safe, performant, and clear)?

The fact that your sig is written in Haskell strongly suggests that you already know the answer to that question. And yes, I'm well aware that the previous sentence is highly ambiguous.

FYI, HIFAR did produce power as a side-effect of the research activity. OPAL does too. So it's technically correct to say that Australia has a power reactor.

I did make a mistake in my comment. However...

The stuff came out of the ground so it can quite easily be buried back in the ground.

It's different "stuff". And that's not taking into account the fact that an awful lot of the uranium came out of the ground via in-situ leaching. There isn't even a hole you can put it in.

And people like you go on about long term pollution, but I bet you don't think twice about the immediate pollution caused by mining to get the ore to build the latest smarttoy you've upgraded to do you?

I resent the implication that I'm some kind of habitual upgrader. But since you asked, yes, I do think about where ores come from, and the livelihoods of the locals around there, and the working conditions of people who make the (few) things that I buy.

Where you get the weird idea that the countries selling uranium are required to accept and dispose of other people's spent fuel I don't know.

Actually, I misread the article. Australia actually sent fuel waste to France for reprocessing, and the bit that can't be recycled has bounced backwards and forwards a few times since then. My bad.

France can get away with this because disposal of spent fuel is, for the most part, someone else's problem.

France does recycle a lot; something like 15-20% of its fuel is from recycling. Most of it, however, is imported from places like Canada, Niger, and Australia. Under the non-proliferation treaty, it's the responsibility of the country of origin to dispose of the waste that came from its fuel.

So yeah, I'll bet France loves nuclear power. They don't have to deal with most of the long-term (i.e. 100,000+ years) consequences.

That, and selling off land that the indigenous people were forcibly removed from.

Even Mussolini made it illegal to report that the trains didn't run on time.

Wait, hang on.

So like the AC said, it's a broken Facebook page.

Good point. I didn't factor in the overpriced nature of both OS X and iOS devices, as well as the need for conspicuous consumption if you're an iOS developer.