I had to read it twice, but that's actually quite funny :-)

(no mod points today...)

This is an important part of the story. Public decency laws, and nude beaches as an official exception to them, are not there to protect the nude people, they're there to protect the prude from the nude.

The sad truth is, however, that while being nude at a nude beach is OK, having a picture taken of you and distributed outside that context is not OK. For one thing, it violates my feeling of privacy more than a picture of me walking in the park (I guess there is still a remnant of prudishness there), but it can also damage my reputation and social standing among people who dislike nudity. Thus, it makes perfect sense to be stricter about taking and distributing pictures from nude beaches, just like there is a distinction between taking a picture of me in my front garden (maybe ok?), sunbathing in my back garden (less ok), watching television in my living room (bad) and having fun in the bedroom or bathroom (really bad).

(Note also that most people don't go to nude beaches because they're exhibitionist: they go there because it is much nicer to sunbathe and swim without swimming gear. If you've never swum naked, you should really try it one day, it's a world of difference)

For most* languages out there you can automatically create a binding to a C api, if 1:1 API use is what you want. It is true that C is the default goto language for libraries, but if you actually want to do something like parse plain text (or json/xml), communicate over a socket, use SCP, etc etc, it is by no means the easiest language to do something in.

For the record: perl was king more like 20 years ago. I started around 1998 and it was all perl. 5 years later I had switched to python and I think most people started realizing that perl was not the future. If you look at e.g. tiobe, you'll see that python went mainstream around 2004 and has stayed more or less constant since.

Yeah, if you want to have fun tinkering with computers, haskell (or prolog, lisp, erlang) are extremely fun to toy around with.

If you want to get something done.... well let's say it ends on ython ;-)

Yeah, although I understand the reasoning for the whitespace and don't object on principled grounds, it can be quite annoying practically if you are copy/pasting code, need to (de)indent a large block, and especially if you are forced to develop somewhere where your favourite editor/IDE that actually handles these cases well is unavailable and you have to work with something that actually inserts a tab when you press tab... *shudders*

It's also a shame that some of the things corrected in python3 were not corrected earlier, but at least they did have the courage to make some breaking changes, instead of waiting for the next language to come around and start without the excess baggage but also without the built-up community and design experience...

(frigging slashdot ate my generics!)

Sure, if you like typing stuff such as

Just because the compiler needs to know advance every method of everything you are ever going to put into your container...

Java has its uses, and for certain hard-core back-end software it might be the most appropriate language; but for writing quick and dirty scripts to get stuff done, for prototyping, and for UI I would stay very far away from it.

(but then I'm an ex-Java developer so probably biased ;-))

Sure, if you like typing stuff such as

Set s = new LinkedHashSet()

Just because the compiler needs to know advance every method of everything you are ever going to put into your container...

Java has its uses, and for certain hard-core back-end software it might be the most appropriate language; but for writing quick and dirty scripts to get stuff done, for prototyping, and for UI I would stay very far away from it.

(but then I'm an ex-Java developer so probably biased ;-))

I really disagree with this. I think everybody who touches computers and data for a living (and who doesn't, nowadays?) should know some essential programming. They might never use it, but they'll understand so much more on what is going on.

I am very far from a car geek, but I can point to the basic components of my car and has some clue about what they do; same for small jobs around the house, basic management skills, etc etc.

+1

Python is quick to learn, portable, has great libraries, both the standard-library and frameworks such as django and sqlalchemy. You can use it OO or more "imperatively", and it has some great primitives for functional-style programming. It is easy to use in a command-line script sense and just as easy to use in a web (backend) role, from very lightweight flask to all-bells-and-whistles django. The documentation and community are also suberb, and you can find a good answer to almost every question online.

Are you serious? You design some sort of wonderful device that can help hundreds of millions of people, that cost 2900,- to design, and you (a) could not find any party such as oxfam interested in sponsoring this and (b) you hope that the public will somehow start donating money to you based on vague promises and some sort of manual with everything interesting XXX'd out.

I have to say, specifying development costs in CHF gives it some air of credibility, I guess NGN would have been a bit too obvious?

If you are legit, just contact some aid companies or just release everything already and then ask for donations

I have a regular internet connection with a regular Dutch ISP and the default router I got from them 3 (?) years ago.

I have a global ipv6 address and use that to connect to some servers at my university that didn't get a public ipv4 address. In fact, I couldn't care less whether my browser would use the ipv4 or ipv6 address to connect me to a web site/

Companies can afford to go ipv6 only as soon as most of their customers can reach them on ipv6, not necessarily "all home routers". But the first real "server" users of ipv6-only will not be well known companies with a global customer base that choose between getting a ipv4 that they can easily afford and going ipv6 only; it will be amateurs, small companies and not-for-profits, etc, who will choose between no way to publish from behind their cgnat, and a way to reach an increasing portion of the internet using a public ipv6.

A language is a dialect with an army and navy

Liunguistically speaking there is no difference between a language and a dialect. Two varieties can be very similar (e.g. my Dutch and that of my wife) or highly dissimilar (e.g. Dutch and Swahili), but there is no definite boundary when something is a variety, accent, dialect, or language. Platt-deutsch spoken in the Netherlands is a language (even ignoring the general decline of our army and navy ;-)), but the platt-deutsch spoken e.g. around Lubeck is considered a dialect. AFAIU The written language in China is only uniform because it was imposed as such. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Oops :-)

So, it is not a hard guess what countries they are talking about, i.e. 6 out of those 7...