There was a Mississippi woman who was attacked by a bison while taking a selfie at Yellowstone. She got away with minor injuries and a lot of ribbing from her co-workers. (We work at the same place.) So bad timing for a selfie, but no death thankfully.
I've often thought that the USA way of taxing is a lot better than the Canadian way. In the US, money that you really don't deserve (inheritance, lotteries, etc.) is taxed quite hard but the money that you earn or invest (to create jobs) is not. In Canada, it is the reverse - lottery wins and other winfalls are not taxed at all but the money you actually earn is way, way over taxed.
first off you should do some research on the canadian taxation system. you will note that canadian income taxes are not much higher (and are lower in many brackets) unless you are making over $100,000; that corporate taxes are significantly (more than 10 points) lower; and that universal healthcare is included in the deal. the pension plan is also fully funded and the banking system is the strongest in the world. lottery wins, estates, and other windfalls are taxed quite heavily in canada as well. however, the size of the US debt, deficit, income disparity, and unemployment rate certainly point to an enlightened taxation system south of the border.
My HP photo printer has a touchscreen LCD. I think most have an LCD of some sort. I can imagine HP thinking they could reserve some of the space for ads...
If all they have is a picture of your
license plate, that doesn't prove you were
driving. We should use this ruling as precedent
to get out of automated tickets when there is
no clear picture of your face.
In places where photo enforcement is used, the laws are generally adjusted to implicate the person who registers the vehicle, and the license plate does tie directly to the vehicle registration. Your crime is not "running a red light", it is "allowing your vehicle to be used by some unknown person to run a red light". If your car was stolen, you can defend yourself using the police report to that effect. Otherwise you are SOL.
Bind 10 was written in Perl 6!
This is why rail works in the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC/Boston corridor. Regional rail is perfectly reasonable. I don't expect to see NY to LA anytime soon.
Aside from regional intercity rail, however, there still exists the problem of what to do once one gets there. I live in metro-NYC and frequently work in metro-DC, but I drive. I can get to Penn Station in NY very easily, and then get to Union Station in DC, but I can't get from Union Station to Northern Virginia beyond the beltway easily at all. Rail doesn't help me until I can get from Union Station to Herndon or Reston efficiently. In all these areas that developed after 1950 or so, the business destinations were spread out on the periphery - probably to avoid the taxes of the cities. It is really difficult to serve an area like Houston with subways/buses/light rail.
You are correct to a point. The Windows OS family has had a lot of attack vectors that don't require user intervention - worms and such - as well as many many vulnerabilities in tools like the default browser and email client. Mac and Linux systems have had far fewer of these vulnerabilities. A reasonably hardened XP system with the firewall turned on, various services turned off, and using Mozilla products instead of IE and Outlook Express is reasonably secure.
I will teach a programming class this summer to advanced middle and high-school students. I plan to teach Ruby. Python is a good choice as well; the two languages are actually quite similar.
I've heard that the book Learn to Program is excellent for this type of student.
Start with the iPhone/iPod Touch's design, and scale it up to about 10x7, the same size as a typical large format paperback like an O'Reilly book. Aside from built in WiFi and BlueTooth, he device includes an Express Card slot and several USB ports, so that it can accommodate the broadband network cards offered by both the HSDPA and EvDO providers. The underlying specs will be closer to a MacBook or MacBook Air.
In iTouch mode, it will be able to do all the things the iTouch does, as well as connect to the 3G cell phone networks with the appropriate adapter. Email, web browsing, etc. are all there. This mode will operate in a low power mode.
One of the "applications" available in the iTouch interface will be an option to boot a full os, which can be some combination of Mac OS X and Windows via bootcamp. Now it becomes a full laptop. A keyboard and mouse can be connected via USB or BlueTooth. An external monitor can be connected via a mini-DVI adapter.
In my view, this would work very well for digital nomads and road warriors. The small device would fit easily into almost any bag, and wouldn't require a true laptop bag. It could be used on a plane or a park bench. It could be whipped out at a moments notice and immediately be useful. At the same time, it is easy to throw a keyboard and mouse into a bag with clothing for a business trip, and have a nice environment to work on documents and presentations at the hotel. When visiting a client, it could be plugged into a projector and run the presentation just as well as a typical laptop.
The problem with this scheme is that the price point wouldn't be anywhere close to the netbooks. This would be a $1,500 machine that would compete with ultra-portables, potentially remaking that segment. I can imagine that the technology could quickly trickle down, however.
Hmm. I don't think you have proven its better than Rails. All you've proven is that you don't know Rails, so you *want* Django to be better. The truth is, they're more similar than you think. And they are both great frameworks.
Let me address your comments...
An object-relational mapper so you don't have to write SQL. But you can still use SQL if needed;
Exactly like Rails.
Automatic admin interfaces. You never need to write another stinkin' admin interface again.
In Rails, you can pick from many plugins that give you very nice ajaxy admin interfaces, or generate a simple one automatically. You don't need to write one if you don't want to.
It's own template language. Although, you can use any other template language you want.
Rails has a template language, too. Erb. And you can use other template languages as well via plugins. I prefer Erb, but many like Haml.
Support for memcached caches is built-in
This is built into Rails too. Along with support for other types of caches as well.
Built in support for i18n and l10n.
You can do this now, though it's not quite as clean as in Python. I was surprised, with a language that started in Japan, that Ruby didn't initially support these things.
Oh, yeah. Building Rails apps is fast, too.
There's a movie teaser line that you may have seen recently, that goes like this: "What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?" The answer is "I'd try." The teaser's actually for another movie, but that's the story that's told in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth": it starts with a man who, after talking with scientists and senators, can't get anyone to listen to what he thinks is the most important thing in the world. It comes out on DVD today.
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira
