Could it be because they tried working on open protocols for sharing and it didn't work? Hate to reign in the $MEGACORP bashing here, but Google really HAVE tried in this area - G+ looks like a last-ditch attempt to gain some traction amongst the big players in "social".

Because "stealing" is the only logical explanation for two people coming up with similar ideas at different times, right?

You have your shifter built into the door? How quaint!

Because of how much more efficient it is to break into an organisation's database of contact hashes, hope like hell the contact hashes are unsalted and then run each of them through your rainbow tables just to get a single email address than it is to write a web crawler in 10 lines of Python which finds emails based on a regex. Your approach is great if you're trying to phish gullible Sony customers but not so great for anything else.

Uh-huh. Because the rest of the world is local to $YOUR_COUNTRY, and it's cheaper to produce electronics in $YOUR_COUNTRY because Anonymous Coward says so. Convincing.

Except all of the electronics manufacturers who are doing their production in $OTHER_COUNTRY and also seem unable to justify producing their electronics in $YOUR_COUNTRY.

This is the real problem with Python, the amount of violence.

Welp, that looks horrible. Here's a pastebin of my original post: http://pastebin.com/uuj5Awpv

Oh my. Udacity is certainly *not* the best way to learn Python. They tend to try and keep it simple, but often this is to the detriment of readability. Here's an example from CS373 (most of the example code is like this):

if x2 >= 0 and x2 =0 and y2

Which could have been written like this:

if 0

Or another example:

next = open.pop()
x = next[1]
y = next[2]
g = next[0]

Which could just as easily be:

g, x, y = open.pop()

Hell, even

for i in range(len(delta)):
    x2 = x + delta[i][0]
    y2 = y + delta[i][1]

is nicer as

for dx, dy in delta:
    x2 = x + dx
    y2 = y + dy

And your example

if(a > 0) { return a + 1; } else { return a -1; }

==

return a + 1 if a > 0 else a -1

Udacity's approach is great for teaching theory, bad for teaching Python. If you want to write idiomatic Python, do some research on iterators, generators, functools, list unpacking, etc. Sorry if the code samples here screw up, but /.'s markup system blows hard.

You can get the Red Ring Edition for under $20 second-hand, I'm told.

The millions of people screaming "KONY2012!!!!" at the top of their lungs disagree with you.
 
America is going to be the world police as long as Americans keep demanding it be. If you don't like it, become a history teacher.

Expel her.

Every time an older version of a living project is forked because somebody claims that the old code is "better" for some reason which nobody can quite explain, a kitten dies. Gnome 3 has resulted in the deaths of thousands of kittens already, so before you:

• - Fork an old project (users)

• - Completely change the direction of the project (maintainers)

Ask yourself if you want to be responsible for the death of a/several kitten(s). If the answer is no, then DON'T DO IT.

Of course, if you think that you can get FF4+ feature parity using the FF 3.x/Gecko 1.x codebase WITHOUT increasing memory usage, then be my guest - kill a kitten. I dare you.
 
(I'm not talking to parent here, who I assume was being sarcastic, but rather to anybody who thinks forking is a good idea)

Because that's the job of a CEO. To take charge of policing their company's third party developer community.
 
The fact that most CEOs don't get their hands dirty with the day-to-day work of the company is the reason that Microsoft hasn't imploded after years of being headed up by an overweight chimpanzee.

Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio? Just curious because I tend to prefer wide-screen monitors that I can flip on their sides or use in landscape orientation depending on what you're doing, and it seems to me that the monitor market is going that way. I'd have thought that square-ish monitors tend to be less comfortable given that humans have a greater horizontal than vertical field of vision (I feel a bit boxed in when using 4:3 CRTs, but that may just be the low resolution).

Obligatory XKCD