"So one case is the basis of your entire (flawed) argument?"

Yep, just one ,a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/04/na tional/main542678.shtml">case.

Then, you go on to acknowledge that my flawed argument is in fact, in part, correct:

"Informants are most often criminals, yes."

Now, we venture into "fantasy land":

"In most cases, the informants are rolling on someone to negotiate a reduced sentence for themselves."

Would you think this would make their testimony more or less reliable?

"Further, the "entrapment line" is not exactly thin: to be considered entrapment, an accused criminal has to be forced to commit a crime that they were unwilling to commit, e.g. "Buy this weed or I shoot you." "

No, entrapment means that the criminal commits a crime that he would not have otherwise committed. Many of us are willing to buy drugs and wouldn't have to be forced to do so, but the undercover officer has to be careful to use specific words and not to use other words. That's because offering drugs to someone is creating a crime from thin air. Were you not there, no crime would have been comitted. Creating crimes is not the job of the police.

"If you willingly give an undercover cop a suitcase full of money for a trunk full of cocaine, it's not entrapment - it's good police work."

Actually, it sounds like the start to a great weekend, minus the undercover cop of course. So, selling cocaine is great police work, but buying it is a crime. Interesting that you have gotten that all straight in your head somehow.

Once you are an experienced Python programmer it isn't a problem, but it can be a pain dealing with white space sensitivity while you are learning. The biggest problem is that the Python code will *look* right, but not execute.

As an experienced programmer prior learning Python it only caused me mild heartache. I don't know how easy or hard it would be for a total newcomer to programming. If they are some of the people that were in my early CS classes, I'd say they'll never get past it without help.

What problems in Ruby are you referring to that a newcomer will experience? In general, I wouldn't expect someone who is just learning to program to run into any serious difficulties with Ruby or Python (other than significant whitespace).

I own several domains and get surprisingly little spam from the catch all accounts.

I actually find catch alls usefull for the reverse reason... when I am forced to enter an email address I use thesite@mydomain.com... this way I can track who is selling/trading my email address. So for example if I use amazon@mydomain.com and 3 weeks later I start getting spam on that address I know where it came from. Also I can then set up that email address as a real pop address and never check it or better yet forward it to uce@ftc.gov the government spam reporting email address...

That is EXACTLY what I was thinking of when I read the parent post. That quote and

"Take the average price of settlement and call that X..."

Snazzed