It gets a lot bigger when the courts force you to pay it off as quickly as possible, to the detriment of your health, wellbeing, and future. Any judgement over $10,000 can't be discharged through bankrupcy... and there are legal ways of collecting on a judgement that make getting your liver chewed out every night by a giant bird look less punishing.

Don't be so judgemental. Every test of Fair Use since SCOTUS got all those Bush nominations put on the bench has ruled in the most restrictive and compromising way about it. She might be making a crazy argument, but the law is crazy too. It has changed in the past decade or so much that crazy arguments are now normal. They think downloading an mp3 is right up there with murder -- there's tens of thousands out there right now who's lives are permafucked because of those changes to copyright law.*

Really, copyright law has been Poe's law for awhile.

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*) At least in my state, you can murder someone (not pre-meditated) and it has less of a long term impact on your life -- you only spend may 7 years in jail, and after that you can get a job, a halfway decent place to live, and enough creature comforts to not be miserable. Get a judgement for $250,000 against you, and you're spending the rest of your life in cheap apartments and driving a car worth less than $2,000. No matter how much money you make at work, you'll never get out from under that; You're a slave until the day you die, because they can take away any of your possessions at will and as much as their paycheck as the courts allow -- which you should go and look up how they calculate that. It makes fixed income senior living look downright luxurous. Oh, and also.. your health will go to shit, because in this country, you have to buy your own insurance... and sorry, but that's not necessary to keep you pumping out the benjamins so... suck it up.

I admit that it took a while to get my head wrapped around what that "magic" was doing behind the scenes, which is really necessary if you are serious about developing with it.

But I have, and now, given the graphics, I can get a basic site up and running very quickly, the majority of the time being spent on the layouts: HTML and CSS.

I have only one objection to Python, but it is a serious objection: most of the sites for which I develop have been on hosted servers. And most of those support Rails these days, but relatively few actively support Python and its frameworks.

They might not have given up but it is also not a success. People continue to stay away from it in droves.

And I'd die of sepsis before trusting my health data to Walmart or AT&T.

That's absolutely true. The only way to avoid being racist is to simply treat everyone by the same fair and equitable standard. If you give special favor to anyone based on race, that policy is inherently racist. In the long term, the only way to ever defeat racism in a real way is stop participating in racism in any form. That creates less racism. Responding with a different flavor of racism still creates more racism.

What's really racist is to fail to understand this, and then to pretend to be a particular race's "friend" by assisting them in ways you assist few others. Of course you want to look nice and to present yourself as a real friend in terms of how much you're willing to do, how many double standards and other corrupt things you're willing to champion. Anything you do for them they learn to stop doing for themselves. It will atrophy. It's like what happens to a muscle when you stop using it, except on a larger scale.

In most other contexts, this is called dependency. A friend you've come to need isn't really so friendly. The relationship has then shifted; it is now based on power. It's not the mutual benevolence you were sold -- if it were that, it would come from a level of consciousness which isn't so petty as to divide by group identity. It's petty because it's an emotional, feeling-based approach to life that ignores reason because it is not appreciated. Most Liberal types are well-meaning but fall into traps like believing reverse-racism to be a solution to racism. It certainly does have the intended effect on votes, with many Democrat politicians taking "the black vote" for granted.

You can see how that couldn't work except that they see themselves as fundamentally different from whites and vice-versa. That's the part that is a lie. That speech by Martin Luther King Jr. is so famous that they had to have heard it. I think they forgot that part about the content of someone's character.

Most Conservatives are worired about things like financial matters, with vocal minorities concerned about things like abortion and gay marriage to the point of obsession. That sucks but it's not their main problem. Their main problem is that they understand enough not to play that particular dependency game, but too little to offer anything much better. They have little more than their own set of unreasonable demands, dividing the entire political landscape into two camps which each find one set slightly less repulsive than the other.

Albert Einstein gave us some good quotes. Ever heard this one? "The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them." That's what the average person will realize once they finally unplug from this self-limiting matrix of left-right politics.

Agree. See my own comment just above, to pretty much the same effect. If those sites had been on Rails or some other sane platform, I could (or could have, in the one case) maintain them far, far easier and with fewer headaches.

CMS is fine for a small, static site or blog. But for anything more sophisticated, they are terrible to maintain.

One big company recently asked me to estimate what it would cost to move their cite from one CMS system to a different, more modern one. But the site is relatively old, with literally thousands of pages. And because there is no automated tool to migrate from that particular CMS system to another one, it would have to be done manually and it would take a very long time. I told them so. I never heard from them again, which is fine with me.

Another site I work on is in 5 different languages. But because the CMS they use doesn't support a language plugin (as does, say, Ruby on Rails), each language is effectively a DIFFERENT site, and has to be maintained as such.

I simply don't recommend that my customers use a CMS at all anymore, unless as I say they are just doing a blog or a small, simple, static site. My experience with CMS has been overwhelmingly negative. They may be relatively easy to set up, but in the long run they are far more trouble than they are worth.

This is a pet peeve of mine. Even the Twitter site does this wrong. If your javascript is turned off, it redirects you to a completely different page, with no history, so you can't just turn javascript on and hit the back button. No, you have to turn javascrpt on, then find the original link you clicked on, and click it again to get to the Twitter page you were trying to visit.

Hint, Twitter: That's a really, really bad user experience.

Not even close. Due to the gross inconsistencies that plague PHP throughout, its learning curve is terrible. Yes, you can get a "Hello World" app running quickly. But you can get a Rails "Hello World" application up and running just as quickly, with even less knowledge of the language.

And due to those same inconsistencies, learning PHP entails much more memorizing of a boatload of functions than other languages do, each of them with a bizarre list of parameters that are all different and even in different orders. Python and Ruby, on the other hand, are far more consistent in the way they operate and how methods are built.

If I wanted something that was easy to learn, PHP is just about the last choice I would make.

Not so. In regard to devices, Rhodes is a cross-platform app development environment entirely built around Ruby and Rails. In fact, as far as I know, it is the only cross-platform mobile development system that has gained any popularity.

And as for web services, I have no idea where that assertion came from. That was really a rather odd statement to make. It is no more difficult to integrate with web services using Ruby and Rails than with any other language or framework. I should know; I do it all the time.