Its only brilliant if you do something nobody else has already done. Imitating success is not brilliant, its obvious.

If you value that book Amazon doesn't sell, and its publisher isn't bright enough to sell it to you somehow, they deserve to go out of business.

Actually I'd argue it is the government's job to protect cultural value; that's precisely why they fund libraries and museums. They just shouldn't be doing it by forcing Amazon to charge shipping.

So you think Amazon should know exactly how many books its going to ship in advance so it can divide a known quantity (bulk shipping costs) by an unknown (total shipments)?

Or maybe you think Amazon should retroactively bill people for their shipping at the end of the year?

Amazon can charge you $50/book for shipping if they want, or $0.01 ... so long as they're paying the shipping company what the company expects to be paid, it can't possibly matter.

Then maybe you should check again.

What you meant to say was that "even though writing your own JavaScript identical to what Dart can be translated into would execute just as quickly, I doubt the capability of the Dart compiler to find speed benefits in JavaScript that I wouldn't find."

See optimizing C++ compiler vs. ASM arguments.

"If you can convert C++ to Assembler, I don't get the point of C++ ..."

So you can write your code in a nicer language, obviously.

What problem have you ever had with indent-based parsing?

Many many people have a problem reading other peoples' C and C++ code because of how it is not always enforced and allows some incredibly poor legibility.

You may not personally have this problem *writing* code but you've almost certainly had it when reading code.

Not all Python is readable, but forcing programmers to use good style is one of the first problems in a braces-based parsing environment. Python just formalized it.

Could have been worse? Python is a fantastic first language to learn how programming is done, especially in the context of getting another job done (Science, Math, etc.)

What percentage of their total hosted IPs are illegal or malware?

Sounds to me like the old "Windows has more viruses because its more popular" argument, used against NO-IP.

If I had a dollar for every user that complained about my 15MB attachment restriction ...

I liked the configuration files myself ...

Yes, I'm sure this configuration file was violating Copyright https://github.com/CyanogenMod...

It takes N hours to develop and test a solution on platform X.

Given that the platform in question is working, easy to deploy, and fully tested, adding platform Y to the mix would require another investment of time and resources that are unnecessary when staying with platform X.

I understand fully why some people only develop Windows software for the same reason. In our case, we develop Linux-based servers, Android and WinMobile based handheld industrial software, and some basic Windows-based interface software for said database.

Deploying the database system on Windows would be a huge hassle and a totally unnecessary cost to clients.

Sure, maybe ... for the vast majority of cases, I'd rather users *never* send attachments by E-mail and instead use corporate web-based sharing for secure documents.

Attachments downloaded from servers can be verified as transmitted, and how many times, and by whom. E-mails cannot. You can't even guarantee a user received the E-mail.