I am not a linguist, but I think you are confusing articles with pronouns. The former is not as powerful in communicating social norms as the latter. More to the point, descriptors for people are more powerful than descriptors for non-person objects. To suggest that language is just arbitrary (in idiosyncratic, not post-structuralist terms [1]), and not without ideological power is naive.

No anglo-centricity about it. Sounds like someone made a fuss about a simple change they should have accepted, and then multiple parties treated each other badly.

[1] Language is arbitrary in terms of signifiers always pointing to signifieds that are in fact signifiers themselves (infinitely recursive); but that means that linguistic choices about something as simple as pronouns can and should be situated in a context to understand them, and that is not without baggage. Like the time a recruiter sent a message to a local UG list I am saying her employer needed to hire "a bunch of guys quickly." It's not intent, but socially situated meaning that makes that problematic reinforcement of stereotype of consequence.

You lack context and make broad assertions about the powers that are granted to the FCC to regulate a common carrier via Title II. Take your phone calls; no one regulates what you say in your phone calls, but regulators can require that all calls you make to domestic numbers actually get connected and not blocked.

With this form of NN, you get more speech, not less.

If you see dictators under every floorboard and spew extreme right-wing nonsense, then go away troll.

You attribute the mistakes of idiots to their language of choice? What does that say about your ability to judge the merits of technical people you work with?

And of course, I submitted with a typo... omit the parenthesis inside the dict on the callables.

Corrected:

{
                1: fn1,
                2: fn2,
                3: deploy_attack_kittens
}[input]()

Here you go:

{
        1: fn1(),
        2: fn2(),
        3: deploy_attack_kittens()
}[input]()

Complaining about a switch statement missing in Python is like complaining that Superman doesn't have a faster airplane.

That narrative is convincing only under duress of propaganda and threat of violence against any pro-unity Ukranians. Russia is effectively fascist; Yanukovych was effectively fascist. AFAICT, the Maidan protests were about severe discontent with Yanukovych's palatial corruption at scales not seen in most places in modern Europe, not just trade alignments -- the small number of right wing extremists that were anti-Yanukovych don't take away from the fact that -- according to most objective observers, journalists, etc -- the vast majority of the voices coming from Kyiv were effectively anti-corruption liberals, not right-wing extremists.

Yet the separatists are playing Wagner, detaining journalists, enacting violence against peaceful pro-unity rallies -- and at the same time talking about defeating fascists, the irony is either lost on them or their intended audience.

Yeah, Fry's takes "defective" return, puts it right back on the shelf. If Fry's does that ten times per item, Best buy should do that twenty.

Assuming Python is important since you have a backend in Python (unclear): choose Django if you want an opinionated framework that makes lots of decisions for you about how *you write code*, or choose Pyramid if you have a desire for an un-opinionated framework. Both are good -- but very different -- choices for the right situations and coder preferences.

RoR and Django are opinionated. I'm guessing there exist opinionated and un-opinionated frameworks in practically any language/runtime. The same is true about the amount of inversion-of-control assumed by the framework in relation to how you extend it.

Non-economic explanation of economic phenomena: this is called the "Commercial Use" trope. It is a rhetorical device that attempts to explain away something purely economic with some alternate cause or agent. It was first largely identified by Kenneth Burke, who identified risks of scapegoating ideologies in the U.S. after the rise of Hitler in a 1939 essay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Hitler%27s_%22Battle%22#Commercial_use

The thing about C programming: high risk (harder to find jobs), high reward (those that have them tend to get higher salaries). This is just an economic reality. I don't see the point in reaching for agent-of-cause from anecdote, when doing that yields unnecessary or dangerous generalizations. Americans and Europeans have to resist this temptation to blame immigrants for patterns that really cannot be attributed to them with proper evidence.

I used to write lexical scanners in C and lex. Now I largely turn to Python to do the same thing. I can reach for C when I need it, and like working in C from time to time. But I also recognize that I am happier working on applications, and the only place where folks still use C for end-user (e.g. desktop) apps is in Gnome+Linux. The money in C (mostly embedded, RTOS, systems-level stuff) is in domains that don't interest me, so I live in higher level languages and find myself a reasonably happy person.

I read the docs for this yesterday, came away impressed about things like iPython integration and the idea that other IDE features of VS could be used for Python. That said, I'm stuck with the position that is it simply too much work and pain to use Windows as an underlying platform, when what I deploy to is largely web apps running on Linux/OSX. I use Windows 7 in virtual machines to test sites with MSIE, and Windows Explorer WebDAV, but that is about it -- it is a pain to do much more in a VM. I just do not have incentive to "live" in Windows, live in a VM on my Mac or Linux desktops, or buy another box just to run a platform I have little use for. I would hope MS has intention of eventually trying to make their tools really compete with Eclipse on the cross-platform game. Alright, back to vim for me. Sigh.