Maybe it's Slashdotted - I get no response.

Sorry, got to pull you up on that one... say the US does have "ops aimed at disabling the Iranian nuclear program". On exactly who's authority is it doing that? Assuming you're from the US, in theory it is on YOUR authority - and don't you think you're entitled to know what your country is doing on your authority?

Most countries don't do stuff like this. Not because they aren't the most powerful country in the world (and the US better not count on relying on that defence much longer), but because they understand their duty to protect their citizens' rights does not give them the right to trample over the citizens of other countries.

Bonus questions:

1. What if Iran had ops aimed at disabling the US nuclear program? Careful you don't descend into "my sovereign state is better than your sovereign state because we're good (TM) and you're bad (TM)" arguments here.

2. If mounting ops against other countries' nuclear programs is a legitimate way of reducing the risk of a nuclear exchange, why didn't the US disable Israel's nuclear program? That would have totally removed Iran's motivation, and actually would have made the world a safer place.

3. How happy are you with your governments' efforts to disable Iraq's nuclear program? That was after all the pretext they used to invade Iraq. One might argue that tens of thousands of lives/trillions of dollars/the US economy would have been saved if a whistle-blower had released cables showing absolutely no evidence of weapons of mass destruction on the eve of that war.

So yes, I DO think citizens have a right to know what their government does in their name, and I think the world would be a better place if Americans started demanding this right too. I can't believe you guys almost impeached Clinton for a blowjob, but Bush/Cheney got off scott free for taking your country to war on completely fabricated pretences.

Good point. I always thought the same about Vimto (a fizzy drink popular in the UK) - either the inventor was spectacularly bad at anagrams, or they had a wicked sense of humour.

59 comments and no-one has traced Zsfgseg yet?

In the good old days we'd have posted his ip address, phone number, physical address and his mother's maiden name by comment 20. Comment 32 would detail how his PC was cracked and display images of the nong via his webcam. By comment 50, his bank account would have been emptied, citizenship revoked, and 2,500 pizzas would be arriving at his door.

So Kernighan and Ritchie forcing you to use curly braces (and all those semicolons!) is fine, but van Rossum forcing you to indent isn't. My original point was that we all indent anyway, so to me that seems the more logical way of marking blocks.

I'm sorry you felt insulted; I guess I'm not going to sway you over to python, and you're not going to sway me back to c (except where performance is critical, when I'll happily concede it is far superior). Maybe we can agree that we each find beauty in these languages, but that like human beauty, it very much depends on the beholder.

Kind regards to you too.

{{{OK guys}{I think we DO need to get off his lawn}}{{He seems to be either {{the only developer in the world who doesn't indent his code}and{is so threatened by lack of braces that he never tries anything without them}}or{a troll {going on his mad contention that Python is a clone of c without braces}}}}{{Shame really}{another good developer doomed to PHP{now THERE is a c-clone{{Oooops}now he's got me trolling too!}}}}}}

Well it's a funny thing about those Nazi indents. Every developer I've ever known has indented their code with a fervour Hitler himself would have commended - despite not strictly needing to!

Why? Because indents turn out to be the most intuitive way for humans to parse blocks - certainly more intuitive than curly braces. So if you're going to do it so YOU can understand your code, why not make the machine understand it the same way?

I do understand about your beautiful lawn, because I have a nice one myself (having coded in c for twenty years). But if you can overcome your discomfort for an hour or two while you explore Python, I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised. The indentation is a very minor part of the elegance of this language. At the end of the day, the important thing for me is that I'm many times more productive than I was in c, and returning to old python code is a pleasure instead of a challenge.

Python is a beautiful language - concise, productive and virtually self-documenting. And Appengine is the future of web app development - scalability and system administration suddenly become Google's problem, and I'm not delusional enough to believe I can do either of those better than them. If your app hits the big time overnight, you're popping champagne corks - not blood vessels. Likewise the vulnerability du jour doesn't have you scrambling to patch all your systems. Bottom line you spend your all time writing beautiful python code, instead of spending half of it managing systems.

The way it bodes for the organisation depends on Google's execution. But my point is that everyone assumes MS's corporate customers are going to stick with Windows come hell or high water, and this might not be so.

It isn't my organisation, by the way - I'd have wanted to do a LOT of user testing (and unless it was unusually polished wait for version 2) before making a decision of this magnitude.

We have a large local organisation that has been a rock-solid windows shop for ever. I've occasionally had dealings with their IT manager, and never got any interest in moving to linux. So I just about fell over when he told me he was planning to switch as many workstations as possible to ChromeOS and Google Docs as soon as it comes out.

This is just one sample of course. But if a conservative Windows-centric organisation is planning to switch so immediately, it doesn't bode well for MS's revenue backbone - all those corporate workstations running windows and office. A switch to ChromeOS would be disruptive, but not much more so than the Windows 7 upgrade that must be on 75% of IT managers' todo lists next year.

Don't get me wrong, MS will be around for years and years, but I think their Silverlight/HTML5 announcement shows they've recognised their supremacy is over and they can't assume everyone runs Windows any more. Interesting times ahead.

Hear hear. I moved to linux years ago, and one of the unintended benefits was that I could honestly say "I haven't used windows for ages - you'd be better off finding someone else."

Linux has given me days of my life back, and I don't miss that sick trapped feeling where you "just take a quick look" and end up doing a full reinstall and still have them coming back day after day because some other odd application they used to have has disappeared.

Oh yes, and virtualbox is an end run around all those "I can't move off windows cos I need to run X" excuses. (Where X is a given application, not Xwindows, ya geek!)

Does the 100 lifetimes/day figure include the waste of the TSA employees working lives? Add it all together, and it must be a severe drag on the world's productivity.

Imagine the US un-hampered by this lunacy. Remove the lawyers too, and the US would once again be the world-beater it once was.

In the education sector, the apps you will be developing will be probably be informational, and your clients will most likely have wifi network access. In which case I'd suggest you developing web apps, so you only need to develop a mobile and a standard interface. Then they'll be available to everyone, and you only have to learn one very well-understood platform.

Pi is so much more than the ratio of the radius and circumference of a circle - it infuses maths and physics to a remarkable degree.

But even so, you are right that there is no utility in calculating it's value beyond a few tens of digits. However, it is an elegant mathematical exercise, and has become the standard to show off your computational maths prowess. As you'll realise when you read the article...