Oh, does your highly effective, widely popular scripting language not suffer from this problem. Thank goodness Python has a benevolent dictator, otherwise it might end up with a hack at the helm that tries to satisfy every whining idiots wish feature, and you end up with something as horrid as C++. But Stroustrup is such crowd pleaser.

I've been using Python since 1.5, and I've always considered it my secret weapon to get things done faster than anyone thought it could be done. All while producing code that is easy to read and maintain, unlike the popular scripting disaster at the time that was called Perl. Over the years its usefulness has only expanded to areas I would have never expected. And so it remains as my not so secret weapon to this day. Is it perfect, no, no language is. Like all languages it has its place where it works well, and plenty where its a bad choice.

Most griping in this thread are by people that clearly have not used Python for anything significant, but have heard about the GIL issue, and feel they must whine that their favorite language is not more popular. The GIL issue can be dealt with in a number of ways, Jython being my favorite. The GIL has never been an issue in anything I've done with Python, for two reasons. One I've never used Python where that would be an issue, and two when I have chosen Python, I designed code so it would not pose a problem. It's a bit crazy, but this seems to work.

Or rather invested in playing with silver balls... Wait that sounded bad. Oh well backspaces are for weenies. Wait that didn't sound to good either. Oh well. Anyway I'm old enough to remember when the bank of EM pins at my local bowling alley was invaded by this strange Pong device. I admit it stole my attention for a bit, but there was no way to win a free game. What fun is that. You could never rule a game, and leave a machine with a dozen free games for the low skill hangers on to wonder how you did it. That Pong thing was then replaced by a Space Invaders, which at least had a high score table. That managed to divert some time away from the pins, but always pins where number one. Well until the Space Invaders was replaced with an Asteroids. Oh dear, that broke the spell. Well at least until solid state pins introduced the speed, multi-ball, gadgetry, and depth of play that just kept improving until it came to a spectacular end with the Bally/Williams Attack From Mars and Medieval Madness games. I was wise enough to acquire an Attack From Mars as my 4th pin, but I still lament being to "grown up" to grab a Medieval Madness when they only went for $3500 instead of the $15,000 they go for today.

THHHHAAAAANNNNKK YOOOOOOOUUUUUU! So many ADHD youngsters can't stay with this film long enough to make it to the space sequences. Also the design and movements of the EVA pods is dead on. There are a few picky errors, like the liquid retreating in the straw in the food tray, but you could argue that vacuum caused it. So it is possible to do right, but it takes a lot of artistic clout to defy the Hollywood formula. Apollo 13 came pretty close, except there did seem to be a lot of sound in space. So I still claim 2001 number 1 in accuracy. They even got where computers turn into our masters right.

There is an opportunity here if M$ is smart enough to take it. Just like Coke turned the New coke fiasco into a brilliant mistake, M$ could turn this Win 8 failure into a chance to actually differentiate its myriad different versions of Windows products. Win Home versions could come with Metro the default UI, with the classic desktop as an option. The pro and enterprise versions could make the standard desktop the default with metro as an option, but with the option to disable Metro all together. The server versions should not have a metro bone in them at all. Now if they basically give the home versions away, charge a fair amount for the pro/ent/server versions... profit. And the hate may die down.

I don't think they are this smart however, and hope they ride this Win8 turkey all the way to oblivion. It is really entertaining to watch.

"how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution."

So that is how the pyramids were built. Thousands of quarry workers, stone masons, and laborers all working from their condos.

Please for the love of god tell me I'm not the only one that got this Blazing Saddles reference. Well done sir.

Please change this planets name to Urectum to avoid all the stupid jokes like this one.

Finally FSM batteries. We are saved. But what will the voltage be?

This photo is so astounding that it brings back memories of the 1960s moon landing days. I was totally enthralled by the awesome techno-wizardry it took set, not one, but two men on the moon, and bring them back to earth. The techno wizardry needed to pull this shot off seems the equal of the feats of those heady days. Well done NASA, well done.

The man's favorite novel is Atlas Shrugged. All credibility voided by that fact alone.

Replace gets() with gets_s()! You couldn't call it something sane like get_line(), or even gets_line() to avoid name collisions. Anything connected with C++ just seems to spread its taint.

According to my Oscar Meyer periodic table of elements, element 120 is called Baloneyium. -- The Simpsons

I had the same experience the first time I attempted to load the page. It was absolutely glacial. Then ,I tried to load the page a second time and it seemed to run just fine. I'm guessing some timing was altered when certain chunks of data got cached on the client. Try letting the page begin rendering, then reload the page. It worked for me on FF 3.6.3 on a MacBookPro3,1 2.6GHz. Curious if anyone else has similar results.