If the little guy sues he's liable for triple damages? Which is probably a drop in the ocean for the big guy? This is meant to improve the situation how?

Lol... "Somalia's worse, ergo, nothing needs fixing". That's some great logic there, Lou.

In response to GP, though... it's clear the TSA's busted. What other good-for-nothing orgs are there? I'm generally of the opinion some have some actual value :)

So it's perfectly acceptable for any physical confrontation to end up with a dead body, no questions asked?

It doesn't matter who started the confrontation, only one person in it had the ability to make it a deadly one.

Your fixed version isn't. The victim didn't have a gun. Or a knife. Or a brick. Lethal force was not clearly necessary, and using it means you should be on trial for murder to determine if that's the case.

You don't even need to replace it. It's already vastly more efficient.

An unarmed kid is dead because someone with a gun pursued and shot him. The ethnicity of the two parties is irrelevant. The shooter should be on trial for murder.

I use python a lot to process large string logs (hudreds of megs or a couple of gigs). The problem is it's all super quick until the working set in the garbage collector gets too big and you fall off a performance cliff. I dunno what they're doing in there, but you easily go from a minute or two run time to half an hour to an hour because of the paging.

I'm not familiar enough with other garbage collected languages and such workloads to know if this is inherent or just a problem with the Python GC. Either way, I think it's fair to say that Python is too slow under such circumstances. I'd like to see it fixed, though, rather than abandon it :)

Some developers are very happy to have their work included in something and used widely. BSD makes companies include an acknowledgement of the use of your work, so you can know you made that project happen. Presumably, if a lot of money is being made by some company that includes your free software, you've helped build something cool that people want. I think a lot of developers see GPL as a "taking my toys and going home" license which discourages free use. If you weren't going to make a million dollar idea with your software, why stop someone else?

Do you get the cash? No. Are your motives really that good if you opened your software only to make money? No. Does a commercial venture using your code prevent free projects from springing up around your work and building the same things as you could if you'd GPL'd it? No.

As a foreigner living in the US, I'm curious as to whether these internet taxes are the similar or different to interstate mail order. That's been going on a lot longer. Can I make an Amazon competitor using snail-mail?

Yup, I also use Crumpler. They're very handy for travel and well padded. I don't know if they're still made waterproof, but mine survived 10hrs in the rain without any moisture on the inside..