No, they know it's an account that accepts email. They don't even know that it delivers mail to a mail spool somewhere, let alone that a human reads it until someone replies...

Maybe he'd like a challenge? Maybe he's tired of everyone comparing him to Jobs and knows that being compared to Ballmer couldn't possibly be worse. Or maybe there's a reason why there are 100:1 odds against him...

Wow:

When that's your best defence, you know you've been doing something wrong...

Depends on what he's done in the past. I can think of a few things I've done that would be mildly embarrassing if they were published, but nothing that would really work as blackmail. For one thing, because enough people saw the various embarrassing things I did that there wouldn't really be any sense of revelation. Most people are in a similar situation.

No, it's retarded to believe that the constitution magically does limit the government's power.

The constitution doesn't grant the government any power. Governments exist solely at sufferance of the governed. If the people wish to limit the power of the government (and are willing to accept the costs of doing so) then they can. If they wish to grant the government total authority, then they can. The constitution simply enumerates the compromise that a group of people a couple of hundred years ago were willing to agree to on what that limit should be. There is very little evidence that the population of the USA over the subsequent two centuries has been willing to enforce those limits.

The belief that the alternatives are belief in the mythical power of a piece of paper and a government doing whatever it wishes (or even the idea that these are mutually exclusive) is exactly what the grandparent was referring to.

Good requirement. When I'm paying a premium rate billed per minute, I really want to have to spend 20-30 seconds listening to a recorded message telling me how much I'm paying...

In the UK, the 0845, 0870 and 0871 prefixes all have fixed costs. The exact cost of calling them depends on your phone company - it does me absolutely no good to be told how much it would cost me to call the number from a BT landline, because I have never had a BT landline.

It's a bit of an odd requirement, because all 0871 numbers are premium-rate lines that cost 10p/minute. Simply advertising the prefix is enough. It's even more silly, because the rate that you're supposed to advertise is the rate of calling from a BT landline, the cost of calling from a mobile or a non-BT landline may be very different.

Good point. If you have cheap energy then mining the moon for other raw materials is possible and so is putting much manufacturing either on the moon or in Earth orbit. Unlike travel in the opposite direction, you don't need large amounts of energy to get things from orbit back to Earth (you do need a lot of cooling / heat shielding). I wonder what the impact on the environment would be if we moved all manufacturing off Earth...

They most likely won't go after the USA, but after corporations that cooperated with the NSA. Given that these are lots of big companies and very few of them are paying much (if any) tax in Europe, there's likely to be little public opposition to very large fines on such entities and hopefully it will mean that companies like Google can then go to members of the US government and say 'this NSA activity is costing the US economy billions of dollars a year and we'll be reminding your constituents of this and the fact that you supported it at the next election'.

It highlights the idiocy in having special laws for religious beliefs. If something should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. If something should be legal, it should be legal for everyone. You shouldn't get special privileges for holding certain beliefs. If it's fine for some people to wear hats or other head coverings in official photographs then it should be legal for everyone.

I got a Voodoo2 when they were new and very expensive (after much pleading and agreeing for it to be counted as a combined Christmas and birthday present). It lasted 3-4 years, until I replaced it with a low-end GeForce 2MX (which was much cheaper). At the time, I was playing a lot of FPS games and so on. Many of my friends had cheaper cards than the Voodoo2. You could always get better graphics by spending more, but most games were quite playable with cheaper cards. Games like Quake 1 and 2 and Half Life even had software renderers that worked fine, albeit at a lower resolution.

The BBC's HD (720p) streams are 3.6Mb/s, so your link would be too slow. You really need at least 5Mb/s if you're not going to have streaming interrupted when another machine on the network starts doing something. I have 30Mb/s that drops to a quarter that speed if I go over some complicated limits, which I've hit once in the last year that I've noticed. Possibly more, but 7.5Mb/s is typically fast enough so I may have gone over without noticing. It used to be 10Mb/s, and I did notice when I went over that cap because HD iPlayer streams stopped working.

CPython is a blurry rocket of speed when compared with Jython.

Is Jython an order of magnitude slower than CPython? Because that's my rule of thumb for CPython vs C. (Actually the programming language shootout's numbers are more like 30-40x slower than C, though that needn't be representative.)

And in theory you can write all the compute-expensive routines in C++.

Sure, but then that's not Python being fast, it's C++ being fast. "You could write the expensive parts in C or C++" can be said of nearly any language. :-)

CPython is... really quite slow. You [i]do[/i] have to do something computationally intensive to notice, of course.

That point and your parent's question are actually related to the PyPy question in the interview actually. PyPy is a JIT for Python that is able to get significant speedups for computationally-bound code. They run 20 benchmarks comparing PyPy and CPython, they are faster on all 20, and see speedups ranging from about a 27% improvement to a ~30x improvement, on average running 6.2 times faster. (Link)

Just to add my input, in the CS department at my university, the Linux that is currently in use is RHEL, the latest version of which (RHEL6) ships with 2.6.6.

Now that said, we also have several other Python installations available from nonstandard locations, and a [i]python[/i] shell alias for me runs 2.7.3 and [i]python3[/i] runs 3.2. (Huh, 3.3 is available. I should update that.)

Also, the Python project that I use that it'd be nice to see support Python 3 is SCons, and there's some talk of that going on and they'll get there eventually, but it's not clear when.