On the other hand, there are also proportionally many Java and .NET programmers, so you'll be competing with fewer people in Python land.

The right answer, anyway, is to learn all three - and a couple more (C++, in particular).

The nice thing about Python interpreter is that it is deliberately written in such a way as to be easy to read and understand. I suspect they could have squeezed quite a bit more performance out of it by using more exotic techniques (e.g. tagged ints), but, arguably, it is not worth it - if you want real perf, you'd do JIT anyway (and that's what PyPy is for), while on the other hand it is beneficial to have a well-understood, stable and foolproof reference implementation for the language.

Sklyarov was arrested on US soil, though. This is about cases where people are arrested in other countries and extradited to US for alleged crimes that they have committed without ever entering the country. In Bout's case, he was extradited from Thailand and convicted for supplying arms to enemies of US for selling arms to FARC. Now personally I think that what the guy did is pretty bad and well deserving of a prison term, but why the hell should it be US demanding his extradition and imprisoning him, and not e.g. Colombia?

As a Russian citizen, I take offense at this claim. The criminals in question are not stealing many millions of dollars from US banks and citizens. They're stealing millions of dollars mostly from Russian citizens, and otherwise screwing our country up. At the same time, they send their children to study and work in US, because they don't want their kids to live in the mess they have themselves created. Denying them the ability to do so is an efficient deterrent, and so I fully support and encourage US to prevent those assholes from setting their feet in any civilized country by any legal means at your disposal. Thank you.

Spot on.

The paradigm spectrum is not Right -- Left.

It is Anarchy -- Tyranny.

Right & Left are both to be found nearer the Tyranny end of the scale the more wealth, power, and control either achieves.

The US has moved quite far along the path towards Tyranny in the last 100 years, and particularly rapidly in the last 15-20 years regardless of (R) or (D) control. Obama not only continuing, but often greatly expanding, nearly all the government constitution-overstepping legal contortions and rights-ignoring/trampling and privacy-invading programs and policies, that everyone including Obama was screaming about under Bush, is a great example.

Strat

That's what wars are really fought for, to shut up annoying people. Same with Hitler, remember those long boring speeches. Man I'm glad we did something about it.

From Wikipedia:

Soviet dead or missing: 81,116
German dead or missing (est).: 92,000–100,000
German POWs: 480,000

So, exactly like I said - by the end of the war, it wasn't even 1:1. And that is battle of Berlin, which was one of the bloodiest late battles on the Eastern Front because Stalin was in a rush to have the city fully under Soviet control before Allies could come in from the west! Let's look at some others.

Prague offensive - 50k Soviet dead, 200k Germans dead or missing.

Vistula-Oder offensive - 50k Soviet dead, 150k German dead and as many POWs.

Siege of Budapest - 80k Soviet vs 100k German & Hungarian.

Operation Bagration - 180k Soviet vs 300k German

Jassy–Kishinev Offensive - 15k Soviet vs 100k German/Romanian (this is the most successful Soviet offensive in terms of casualties this war, and that's in summer '44!)

The notion that Soviet Union won the war by "human wave tactics" and piling the bodies high is a myth. This sort of approach has seen some limited use in the first months of the war to delay German advance while relocating the industry and gathering reserves, but the actual march towards Berlin was not like that at all - it was as much tactics and logistics as numeric superiority.

Ultimately, USSR won because it was such an industrial powerhouse that it managed to survive the initial German blow without crumbling - and Germans didn't get a second chance. Once their rapid advance was stopped, the clock was ticking for them, because Soviets could and did outproduce them in everything, from small arms and cartridges to tanks and bombs. And by the end of WW2, that powerhouse was not only recovered, it was operating on a scale bigger than what it has been prior to German invasion.

If Germans, after conquering most of Europe, failed against Soviets when they were weaker and less experienced, what makes you believe that Americans, who also had significant logistical issues what with their industry being on another continent and no convenient oil supply to Western Europe other than shipping, would fare any better in '45? Nukes? There weren't enough of them, and only bombers for delivery (and unlike Japan by August 1945, USSR had a strong air force at that time). Boots on the ground? I very much doubt that USA could bear to field enough to do the job, assuming that such a thing was even possible. Soviet Army was 11 million strong at the end of the war. Even assuming the ridiculous 2:1 rate in favor of American soldiers, would US be willing to sacrifice the lives of 5 million of its soldiers for the sake of victory? Germany and USSR could pull this off because they were totalitarian cult of personality regimes; I very much doubt that a democracy can tolerate this kind of losses, especially in an offensive war far away from its own territory and with no clear defensive goal.

This is a different issue, though, and is completely unrelated to the one that the article raises. Its solution also doesn't require a ban on private schools; only their regulation.

Brilliant.

She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that.

How about you take a deep breath and live with the fact that your existing system is a complete train wreck and people who love their children donâ(TM)t want to participate in your continuing failure?

I think that about sums it up.

Agreed.

Something you may find interesting; A copy of the text of an eighth-grade test circa 1895.

http://www.salina.com/1895test/ (Google also shows a working link to the document available directly from Kansas State Dept. of Education as .PDF)

Heading:

"Examination Graduation Questions of Saline County, Kansas

April 13, 1895
J.W. Armstrong, County Superintendent
Examinations in Salina, Cambria, Gypsum City, Assaria, Falun, Bavaria, and District No. 74 (in Glendale Twp.)
READING AND PENMANSHIP - The Examination will be oral, and the Penmanship of Applicants will be graded from the manuscripts."

I don't think a majority of college grads these days could pass the above-linked test. Yet those with power over public schools want to go further down the same path and throw ever-more money into a system that's resulted in a decades-long history of utter failure to educate better.

Strat

I understand there are differences in the underlying ideological dogmas.

Point is, it mattered little to the millions of individual people *both* have killed, which particular flavor of authoritarian tyranny it was that murdered them...this time. The end result for individuals unfortunate enough to be under either political/social ideologies' power is nearly identical. In that way the differences between socialism/fascism/communism are distinctions without a difference to the common man.

Bullets, machetes, poison gas, intentional starvation, etc etc, don't feel any differently to the individuals of a systematically oppressed/targeted/scapegoated population group depending on the ideologies or races of the thugs and murderers involved.

Strat

No, all students don't need to be educated. If we handled this the way countries like Germany did (or the US did in the old days), we'd have different schools for different kids, and the problem kids would go to the dumb-kid school, and be kept away from the rest of the kids. Just because there's a public mandate to have compulsory school for all children doesn't mean they all need to be mainstreamed in the same school and the same classes.

They can often believe you've taken a slip road (off ramp) when you haven't, and vice versa, before correcting. But to believe you're on a road you are simply passing over is a big fuck up.

This happens to me all the time with Google Maps on Android.

I don't think a massive shift toward socialism would help much actually. It's not just the parents' wealth (or lack thereof) that's the problem, it's their culture and attitude towards education. Poor people generally don't believe that much in it; my mother was always told by her family that education is a waste of time and that a woman needs to get married at 16 and start having babies. Forcibly redistributing wealth to people like that isn't going to change their attitudes towards education. These things can be changed through well-funded education systems that seek to overcome parents' bad attitudes, but it takes generations, and the US has been going backwards for a long time.

It's called self-segregation. If you lump everyone together, the good parents are basically going to be fighting against the bad parents and their bad kids, and the overall quality of education is going to be mediocre at best, and that's IF the good parents put in a Herculean effort to fix things. Even then, their power is very limited by the political school boards, and by state and federal laws and funding. There's only so much a bunch of concerned parents can do.

However, if they take their kids out of the school and put them into a private school, they have far more say. The private school isn't answerable to stupid government requirements like NCLB, and private schools compete with each other. If one school sucks, you can leave it and put your kids in a competing school that's better-run. And since private schools don't have to deal with bad parents and bad kids, they have a much easier time of providing a good education.

It doesn't matter. Even if this system produces better results, it still restricts citizens' freedoms beyond what should be acceptable in a free society.

I fully support public education funded by taxes that everyone pays, and I believe that American system in particular is in a very sorry state to a large extent because of the way it is funded - it should really be funded predominantly on state level from income taxes, and better at that (even if this means higher taxes). But the state has absolutely no business telling people that they can't run a private school, so long as that school conforms to all the minimum requirements set forth for public schools.

(In a similar vein, a single-payer public healthcare system is good, but restrictions on private healthcare providers are evil.)