(setf what-the-fuck nil) ; Creating what-the-fuck variable

Don't worry, we have great journalists like Michael Grunwald that are dying to write stories about drone attacks on sources - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/17/michael-grunwald-julian-assange_n_3773981.html

If I remember correctly, in one of the invasions, the aliens landed in China.

The tide comes in, the tide goes out ...

Field: Engineering, Fluid Mechanics. uple of people working full time in institutions with thousands of employees? That's nothing considering that these institutions already spend millions. Two employees on each university is nothing compared with what is wasted on subscriptions and that is exactly the point. I have discussed this with several professors and colleagues often and these issues never come up. It always comes down to the impact factor of the journals. Every other is a nuisance at best.

Who do you think a publishing professional is? Someone with a PhD on Quantum Electrodynamics? Editors are not librarians and are usually not paid, so what? Whoever said that librarians don't do anything?

Formatting is the problem??? Are you kidding me? That could have been a problem 15 years ago but any paper being submitted requires that they be properly formatted already. Developing a new format? Doesn't have to be perfect and the same format can be used by almost every journal. By the way that's basically what most large publishers do.

All I said is that universities already have most of the infrastructure and people necessary to do the necessary work. Just going the extra 100 m would cost them very little and would, eventually save perhaps more than 50% of library budgets.

Clearly you don't have any imagination at all and don't seem to realize the huge research support infrastructure that exists in universities and funding agencies. in many places, usually where public universities are common, funding agencies often are the ones responsible for journal subscriptions. They (and any large university really) spend millions of dollars every year on subscriptions. These same funding agencies have people that receive research grant proposals and distribute them for analysis. Does that remind you of anything???

The infrastructure and people are already there. And, by the way, pooling resources doesn't necessarily involve "expensive job of coordinating". For instance, some univerity or department within a university decides to be responsible for a journal. The only coordination necessary is for other universities to not create the same journal.

And the sad part is that there is already a large infrastructure in universities that could do most of the "boring" work: libraries and librarians themselves. They know what to do and mostly know and how to do it.

Pooling among different universities would drop the publication costs to nearly zero. Hell, if each university had one person doing this work and a single server to handle the work, there wouldn't be enough work to go around. And libraries would be saving a large percentage of their budgets.

The publishers are today middleman parasites.

Racket is the scheme implementation on the language shootout you linked. Only two dynamically typed languages are faster: javascript and Common Lisp (SBCL) (which is faster than javascript). This makes scheme pretty good and SBCL is lisp after all. I don't know about LuaJIT

Not middle class Brazilians. Parent post is most probably correct.

Under water it "fell" straight upwards.

You are actually right but you are missing the point. Python doesn't compete with Fortran, it supplements it. With tools such as f2py, it is very easy to call fortran code from python (and there are tools that make it easy to call C/C++). This combination really potentializes both languages: bottlenecks use Fortran/C/C++ and the rest python. This combination is already popular: numpy/scipy is basically that.

I don't think that being easy is python's main advantage. Using a dynamic environment were you can type code that gets executed immediately and were you can explore the data is a really big help. On the other hand, the same could be done with R, Matlab, Octave or Scilab and it is done. In some ways these languages are better suited than python because they were designed to do math, or more specifically matrices/arrays very well and might have better syntax for that. But then doing anything else increasingly becomes a pain once the problem becomes larger or more complex and that's where, IMHO, python gains an advantage. Better module/OOP environment, better GUI,etc.

By the way, I work on scientific computing, using spectral element methods in computational fluid dynamics and I also work on a wind tunnel and I do lot's of data acquisition and processing. Right now I use C++ for lower level stuff (and bottlenecks) and R. I have been seriously considering switching to Python to have an easier environment to maintain.

This is apple we are talking about. Somehow this is a feature...

It appears that this atitude is disapearing. A few years back this Lame-o guy would be despised by his peers. People would turn their backs on him and no one would ever trust him again. Hell, even the military, who would like and use his info, would never trust him! That certainly represents the zeitgeist.

They will eventually. First they will deny it. Then they will say that the drone experienced mechanical problems and was destroyed and after a while they will recognize that the Iranians really have the drone but they didn't shoot it down or anything, some random problem downed it. At least that's what happened the last time.

Just like they lied when they captured a drone, apparently intact, a while ago.