Python usage numbers

[Eric Snow]

Does anyone have (or know of) accurate totals and percentages on how
Python is used? I'm particularly interested in the following
groupings:

- new development vs. stable code-bases
- categories (web, scripts, "big data", computation, etc.)
- "bare metal" vs. on top of some framework
- regional usage

I'm thinking about this partly because of the discussion on
python-ideas about the perceived challenges of Unicode in Python 3.
All the rhetoric, anecdotal evidence, and use-cases there have little
meaning to me, in regards to Python as a whole, without an
understanding of who is actually affected.

For instance, if frameworks (like django and numpy) could completely
hide the arguable challenges of Unicode in Python 3--and most projects
were built on top of frameworks--then general efforts for making
Unicode easier in Python 3 should go toward helping framework writers.

Not only are such usage numbers useful for the Unicode discussion
(which I wish would get resolved and die so we could move on to more
interesting stuff :) ). They help us know where efforts could be
focused in general to make Python more powerful and easier to use
where it's already used extensively. They can show us the areas that
Python isn't used much, thus exposing a targeted opportunity to change
that.

Realistically, it's not entirely feasible to compile such information
at a comprehensive level, but even generally accurate numbers would be
a valuable resource. If the numbers aren't out there, what would some
good approaches to discovering them? Thanks!

-eric

[Stefan Behnel]

Eric Snow, 11.02.2012 22:02:

> - categories (web, scripts, "big data", computation, etc.)

No numbers, but from my stance, the four largest areas where Python is used
appear to be (in increasing line length order):

a) web applications
b) scripting and tooling
c) high-performance computation
d) testing (non-Python/embedded/whatever code)

I'm sure others will manage to remind me of the one or two I forgot...

Stefan

[Andrew Berg]

On 2/11/2012 3:02 PM, Eric Snow wrote:
> I'm thinking about this partly because of the discussion on
> python-ideas about the perceived challenges of Unicode in Python 3.

> For instance, if frameworks (like django and numpy) could completely
> hide the arguable challenges of Unicode in Python 3--and most projects
> were built on top of frameworks--then general efforts for making
> Unicode easier in Python 3 should go toward helping framework writers.

Huh? I'll admit I'm a novice, but isn't Unicode mostly trivial in py3k
compared to 2.x? Or are you referring to porting 2.x to 3.x? I've been
under the impression that Unicode in 2.x can be painful at times, but
easy in 3.x.
I've been using 3.2 and Unicode hasn't been much of an issue.
--
CPython 3.2.2 | Windows NT 6.1.7601.17640

[Mark Lawrence]

On 11/02/2012 21:02, Eric Snow wrote:
> Does anyone have (or know of) accurate totals and percentages on how
> Python is used? I'm particularly interested in the following
> groupings:
>
> - new development vs. stable code-bases

> - categories (web, scripts, "big data", computation, etc.)

> - "bare metal" vs. on top of some framework
> - regional usage
>

> I'm thinking about this partly because of the discussion on
> python-ideas about the perceived challenges of Unicode in Python 3.

> All the rhetoric, anecdotal evidence, and use-cases there have little
> meaning to me, in regards to Python as a whole, without an
> understanding of who is actually affected.
>

> For instance, if frameworks (like django and numpy) could completely
> hide the arguable challenges of Unicode in Python 3--and most projects
> were built on top of frameworks--then general efforts for making
> Unicode easier in Python 3 should go toward helping framework writers.
>

> Not only are such usage numbers useful for the Unicode discussion
> (which I wish would get resolved and die so we could move on to more
> interesting stuff :) ). They help us know where efforts could be
> focused in general to make Python more powerful and easier to use
> where it's already used extensively. They can show us the areas that
> Python isn't used much, thus exposing a targeted opportunity to change
> that.
>
> Realistically, it's not entirely feasible to compile such information
> at a comprehensive level, but even generally accurate numbers would be
> a valuable resource. If the numbers aren't out there, what would some
> good approaches to discovering them? Thanks!
>
> -eric

As others have said on other Python newsgroups it ain't a problem. The
only time I've ever had a problem was with matplotlib which couldn't
print a £ sign. I used a U to enforce unicode job done. If I had a
major problem I reckon that a search on c.l.p would give me an answer
easy peasy.

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[Eric Snow]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 2:51 PM, Andrew Berg <bahamut...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/11/2012 3:02 PM, Eric Snow wrote:

>> I'm thinking about this partly because of the discussion on
>> python-ideas about the perceived challenges of Unicode in Python 3.
>

>> For instance, if frameworks (like django and numpy) could completely
>> hide the arguable challenges of Unicode in Python 3--and most projects
>> were built on top of frameworks--then general efforts for making
>> Unicode easier in Python 3 should go toward helping framework writers.

> Huh? I'll admit I'm a novice, but isn't Unicode mostly trivial in py3k
> compared to 2.x? Or are you referring to porting 2.x to 3.x? I've been
> under the impression that Unicode in 2.x can be painful at times, but
> easy in 3.x.
> I've been using 3.2 and Unicode hasn't been much of an issue.

My expectation is that yours is the common experience. However, in at
least one current thread (on python-ideas) and at a variety of times
in the past, _some_ people have found Unicode in Python 3 to make more
work. So that got me to thinking about who's experience is the
general case, and if any concerns broadly apply to more that
framework/library writers (like django, jinja, twisted, etc.). Having
usage statistics would be helpful in identifying the impact of things
like Unicode in Python 3.

-eric

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Eric Snow <ericsnow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> However, in at
> least one current thread (on python-ideas) and at a variety of times
> in the past, _some_ people have found Unicode in Python 3 to make more
> work.

If Unicode in Python is causing you more work, isn't it most likely
that the issue would have come up anyway? For instance, suppose you
have a web form and you accept customer names, which you then store in
a database. You could assume that the browser submits it in UTF-8 and
that your database back-end can accept UTF-8, and then pretend that
it's all ASCII, but if you then want to upper-case the name for a
heading, somewhere you're going to needto deal with Unicode; and when
your programming language has facilities like str.upper(), that's
going to make it easier, not later. Sure, the simple case is easier if
you pretend it's all ASCII, but it's still better to have language
facilities.

ChrisA

[Eric Snow]

Yeah, that's how I see it too. However, my sample size is much too
small to have any sense of the broader Python 3 experience. That's
what I'm going for with those Python usage statistics (if it's even
feasible).

-eric

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:28:30 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Eric Snow
> <ericsnow...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> However, in at
>> least one current thread (on python-ideas) and at a variety of times in
>> the past, _some_ people have found Unicode in Python 3 to make more
>> work.
>
> If Unicode in Python is causing you more work, isn't it most likely that
> the issue would have come up anyway?

The argument being made is that in Python 2, if you try to read a file
that contains Unicode characters encoded with some unknown codec, you
don't have to think about it. Sure, you get moji-bake rubbish in your
database, but that's the fault of people who insist on not being
American. Or who spell Zoe with an umlaut.

In Python 3, if you try the same thing, you get an error. Fixing the
error requires thought, and even if that is only a minuscule amount of
thought, that's too much for some developers who are scared of Unicode.
Hence the FUD that Python 3 is too hard because it makes you learn
Unicode.

I know this isn't exactly helpful, but I wish they'd just HTFU. I'm with
Joel Spolsky on this one: if you're a programmer in 2003 who doesn't have
at least a basic working knowledge of Unicode, you're the equivalent of a
doctor who doesn't believe in germs.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Learning a basic working knowledge of Unicode is not that hard. You don't
need to be an expert, and it's just not that scary.

The use-case given is:

"I have a file containing text. I can open it in an editor and see it's
nearly all ASCII text, except for a few weird and bizarre characters like
£ © ± or ö. In Python 2, I can read that file fine. In Python 3 I get an
error. What should I do that requires no thought?"

Obvious answers:

- Try decoding with UTF8 or Latin1. Even if you don't get the right
characters, you'll get *something*.

- Use open(filename, encoding='ascii', errors='surrogateescape')

(Or possibly errors='ignore'.)



--
Steven

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 11, 8:23 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve

+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:28:30 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Eric Snow
> > <ericsnowcurren...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> However, in at
> >> least one current thread (on python-ideas) and at a variety of times in
> >> the past, _some_ people have found Unicode in Python 3 to make more
> >> work.
>
> > If Unicode in Python is causing you more work, isn't it most likely that
> > the issue would have come up anyway?
>
> The argument being made is that in Python 2, if you try to read a file
> that contains Unicode characters encoded with some unknown codec, you
> don't have to think about it. Sure, you get moji-bake rubbish in your
> database, but that's the fault of people who insist on not being
> American. Or who spell Zoe with an umlaut.

That's not the worst of it... i have many times had a block of text
that was valid ASCII except for some intermixed Unicode white-space.
Who the hell would even consider inserting Unicode white-space!!!

> "I have a file containing text. I can open it in an editor and see it's
> nearly all ASCII text, except for a few weird and bizarre characters like
> £ © ± or ö. In Python 2, I can read that file fine. In Python 3 I get an
> error. What should I do that requires no thought?"
>
> Obvious answers:

the most obvious answer would be to read the file WITHOUT worrying
about asinine encoding.

[Chris Angelico]

What this statement misunderstands, though, is that ASCII is itself an
encoding. Files contain bytes, and it's only what's external to those
bytes that gives them meaning. The famous "bush hid the facts" trick
with Windows Notepad shows the folly of trying to use internal
evidence to identify meaning from bytes.

Everything that displays text to a human needs to translate bytes into
glyphs, and the usual way to do this conceptually is to go via
characters. Pretending that it's all the same thing really means
pretending that one byte represents one character and that each
character is depicted by one glyph. And that's doomed to failure,
unless everyone speaks English with no foreign symbols - so, no
mathematical notations.

ChrisA

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:38:37 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> Everything that displays text to a human needs to translate bytes into
> glyphs, and the usual way to do this conceptually is to go via
> characters. Pretending that it's all the same thing really means
> pretending that one byte represents one character and that each
> character is depicted by one glyph. And that's doomed to failure, unless
> everyone speaks English with no foreign symbols - so, no mathematical
> notations.

Pardon me, but you can't even write *English* in ASCII.

You can't say that it cost you £10 to courier your résumé to the head
office of Encyclopædia Britanica to apply for the position of Staff
Coördinator. (Admittedly, the umlaut on the second "o" looks a bit stuffy
and old-fashioned, but it is traditional English.)

Hell, you can't even write in *American*: you can't say that the recipe
for the 20¢ WobblyBurger™ is © 2012 WobblyBurgerWorld Inc.

ASCII truly is a blight on the world, and the sooner it fades into
obscurity, like EBCDIC, the better.

Even if everyone did change to speak ASCII, you still have all the
historical records and documents and files to deal with. Encodings are
not going away.


--
Steven

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:
> You can't say that it cost you £10 to courier your résumé to the head
> office of Encyclopædia Britanica to apply for the position of Staff
> Coördinator.

True, but if it cost you $10 (or 10 GBP) to courier your curriculum
vitae to the head office of Encyclopaedia Britannica to become Staff
Coordinator, then you'd be fine. And if it cost you $10 to post your
work summary to Britannica's administration to apply for this Staff
Coordinator position, you could say it without 'e' too. Doesn't mean
you don't need Unicode!

ChrisA

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 18:36:52 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:

>> "I have a file containing text. I can open it in an editor and see it's
>> nearly all ASCII text, except for a few weird and bizarre characters
>> like £ © ± or ö. In Python 2, I can read that file fine. In Python 3 I
>> get an error. What should I do that requires no thought?"
>>
>> Obvious answers:
>
> the most obvious answer would be to read the file WITHOUT worrying about
> asinine encoding.

Your mad leet reading comprehension skillz leave me in awe Rick.

If you try to read a file containing non-ASCII characters encoded using
UTF8 on Windows without explicitly specifying either UTF8 as the
encoding, or an error handler, you will get an exception.

It's not just UTF8 either, but nearly all encodings. You can't even
expect to avoid problems if you stick to nothing but Windows, because
Windows' default encoding is localised: a file generated in (say) Israel
or Japan or Germany will use a different code page (encoding) by default
than one generated in (say) the US, Canada or UK.



--
Steven

[Andrew Berg]

On 2/12/2012 12:10 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> It's not just UTF8 either, but nearly all encodings. You can't even
> expect to avoid problems if you stick to nothing but Windows, because
> Windows' default encoding is localised: a file generated in (say) Israel
> or Japan or Germany will use a different code page (encoding) by default
> than one generated in (say) the US, Canada or UK.

Generated by what? Windows will store a locale value for programs to
use, but programs use Unicode internally by default (i.e., API calls are
Unicode unless they were built for old versions of Windows), and the
default filesystem (NTFS) uses Unicode for file names. AFAIK, only the
terminal has a localized code page by default.
Perhaps Notepad will write text files with the localized code page by
default, but that's an application choice...

[Matej Cepl]

On 12.2.2012 03:23, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> The use-case given is:
>
> "I have a file containing text. I can open it in an editor and see it's
> nearly all ASCII text, except for a few weird and bizarre characters like
> £ © ± or ö. In Python 2, I can read that file fine. In Python 3 I get an
> error. What should I do that requires no thought?"
>
> Obvious answers:
>
> - Try decoding with UTF8 or Latin1. Even if you don't get the right
> characters, you'll get *something*.
>
> - Use open(filename, encoding='ascii', errors='surrogateescape')
>
> (Or possibly errors='ignore'.)

These are not good answer, IMHO. The only answer I can think of, really, is:

- pack you luggage, your submarine waits on you to peel onions in it
(with reference to the Joel's article). Meaning, really, you should
learn your craft and pull up your head from the sand. There is a wider
world around you.

(and yes, I am a Czech, so I need at least latin-2 for my language).

Best,

Matěj

[Matej Cepl]

On 12.2.2012 09:14, Matej Cepl wrote:
>> Obvious answers:
>>
>> - Try decoding with UTF8 or Latin1. Even if you don't get the right
>> characters, you'll get *something*.
>>
>> - Use open(filename, encoding='ascii', errors='surrogateescape')
>>
>> (Or possibly errors='ignore'.)
>
> These are not good answer, IMHO. The only answer I can think of, really,
> is:

Slightly less flameish answer to the question “What should I do,
really?” is a tough one: all these suggested answers are bad because
they don’t deal with the fact, that your input data are obviously
broken. The rest is just pure GIGO … without fixing (and I mean, really,
fixing, not ignoring the problem, which is what the previous answers
suggest) your input, you’ll get garbage on output. And you should be
thankful to py3k that it shown the issue to you.

BTW, can you display the following line?

Příliš žluťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy.

Best,

Matěj

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 01:05:35 -0600, Andrew Berg wrote:

> On 2/12/2012 12:10 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> It's not just UTF8 either, but nearly all encodings. You can't even
>> expect to avoid problems if you stick to nothing but Windows, because
>> Windows' default encoding is localised: a file generated in (say)
>> Israel or Japan or Germany will use a different code page (encoding) by
>> default than one generated in (say) the US, Canada or UK.
> Generated by what? Windows will store a locale value for programs to
> use, but programs use Unicode internally by default

Which programs? And we're not talking about what they use internally, but
what they write to files.

> (i.e., API calls are
> Unicode unless they were built for old versions of Windows), and the
> default filesystem (NTFS) uses Unicode for file names.

No. File systems do not use Unicode for file names. Unicode is an
abstract mapping between code points and characters. File systems are
written using bytes.

Suppose you're a fan of Russian punk bank Наӥв and you have a directory
of their music. The file system doesn't store the Unicode code points
1053 1072 1253 1074, it has to be encoded to a sequence of bytes first.

NTFS by default uses the UTF-16 encoding, which means the actual bytes
written to disk are \x1d\x040\x04\xe5\x042\x04 (possibly with a leading
byte-order mark \xff\xfe).

Windows has two separate APIs, one for "wide" characters, the other for
single bytes. Depending on which one you use, the directory will appear
to be called Наӥв or 0å2.

But in any case, we're not talking about the file name encoding. We're
talking about the contents of files.

> AFAIK, only the
> terminal has a localized code page by default. Perhaps Notepad will
> write text files with the localized code page by default, but that's an
> application choice...

Exactly. And unless you know what encoding the application chooses, you
will likely get an exception trying to read the file.


--
Steven

[Andrew Berg]

On 2/12/2012 3:12 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> NTFS by default uses the UTF-16 encoding, which means the actual bytes
> written to disk are \x1d\x040\x04\xe5\x042\x04 (possibly with a leading
> byte-order mark \xff\xfe).

That's what I meant. Those bytes will be interpreted consistently across
all locales.

> Windows has two separate APIs, one for "wide" characters, the other for
> single bytes. Depending on which one you use, the directory will appear
> to be called Наӥв or 0å2.

Yes, and AFAIK, the wide API is the default. The other one only exists
to support programs that don't support the wide API (generally, such
programs were intended to be used on older platforms that lack that API).

> But in any case, we're not talking about the file name encoding. We're
> talking about the contents of files.

Okay then. As I stated, this has nothing to do with the OS since
programs are free to interpret bytes any way they like.

[Mark Lawrence]

Yes in Thunderbird, Notepad, Wordpad and Notepad++ on Windows Vista,
can't be bothered to try any other apps.

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5715.1329021...@python.org>,

Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Rick Johnson
> <rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Feb 11, 8:23 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
> > +comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> >> "I have a file containing text. I can open it in an editor and see it's
> >> nearly all ASCII text, except for a few weird and bizarre characters like

> >> Ł Š ą or ö. In Python 2, I can read that file fine. In Python 3 I get an

> >> error. What should I do that requires no thought?"
> >>
> >> Obvious answers:
> >
> > the most obvious answer would be to read the file WITHOUT worrying
> > about asinine encoding.
>
> What this statement misunderstands, though, is that ASCII is itself an
> encoding. Files contain bytes, and it's only what's external to those
> bytes that gives them meaning.

Exactly. <soapbox class="wise-old-geezer">. ASCII was so successful at
becoming a universal standard which lasted for decades, people who grew
up with it don't realize there was once any other way. Not just EBCDIC,
but also SIXBIT, RAD-50, tilt/rotate, packed card records, and so on.
Transcoding was a way of life, and if you didn't know what you were
starting with and aiming for, it was hopeless. Kind of like now where
we are again with Unicode. </soapbox>

[Roy Smith]

In article <4f375347$0$29986$c3e8da3$5496...@news.astraweb.com>,

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:

> ASCII truly is a blight on the world, and the sooner it fades into
> obscurity, like EBCDIC, the better.

That's a fair statement, but it's also fair to say that at the time it
came out (49 years ago!) it was a revolutionary improvement on the
extant state of affairs (every manufacturer inventing their own code,
and often different codes for different machines). Given the cost of
both computer memory and CPU cycles at the time, sticking to a 7-bit
code (the 8th bit was for parity) was a necessary evil.

As Steven D'Aprano pointed out, it was missing some commonly used US
symbols such as ¢ or ©. This was a small price to pay for the
simplicity ASCII afforded. It wasn't a bad encoding. I was a very good
encoding. But the world has moved on and computing hardware has become
cheap enough that supporting richer encodings and character sets is
realistic.

And, before people complain about the character set being US-Centric,
keep in mind that the A in ASCII stands for American, and it was
published by ANSI (whose A also stands for American). I'm not trying to
wave the flag here, just pointing out that it was never intended to be
anything other than a national character set.

Part of the complexity of Unicode is that when people switch from
working with ASCII to working with Unicode, they're really having to
master two distinct things at the same time (and often conflate them
into a single confusing mess). One is the Unicode character set. The
other is a specific encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc). Not to mention silly
things like BOM (Byte Order Mark). I expect that some day, storage
costs will become so cheap that we'll all just be using UTF-32, and
programmers of the day will wonder how their poor parents and
grandparents ever managed in a world where nobody quite knew what you
meant when you asked, "how long is that string?".

[Dan Sommers]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:08:24 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:
>> You can't say that it cost you £10 to courier your résumé to the head
>> office of Encyclopædia Britanica to apply for the position of Staff
>> Coördinator.
>

> True, but if it cost you $10 (or 10 GBP) to courier your curriculum
> vitae to the head office of Encyclopaedia Britannica to become Staff
> Coordinator, then you'd be fine. And if it cost you $10 to post your
> work summary to Britannica's administration to apply for this Staff
> Coordinator position, you could say it without 'e' too. Doesn't mean you
> don't need Unicode!

Back in the late 1970's, the economy and the outlook in the USA sucked,
and the following joke made the rounds:

Mr. Smith: Good morning, Mr. Jones. How are you?

Mr. Jones: I'm fine.

(The humor is that Mr. Jones had his head so far [in the sand] that he
thought that things were fine.)

American English is my first spoken language, but I know enough French,
Greek, math, and other languages that I am very happy to have more than
ASCII these days. I imagine that even Steven's surname should be spelled
D’Aprano rather than D'Aprano.

Dan

[rusi]

On Feb 12, 10:51 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve

+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:38:37 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > Everything that displays text to a human needs to translate bytes into
> > glyphs, and the usual way to do this conceptually is to go via
> > characters. Pretending that it's all the same thing really means
> > pretending that one byte represents one character and that each
> > character is depicted by one glyph. And that's doomed to failure, unless
> > everyone speaks English with no foreign symbols - so, no mathematical
> > notations.
>
> Pardon me, but you can't even write *English* in ASCII.
>
> You can't say that it cost you £10 to courier your résumé to the head
> office of Encyclopædia Britanica to apply for the position of Staff
> Coördinator. (Admittedly, the umlaut on the second "o" looks a bit stuffy
> and old-fashioned, but it is traditional English.)
>
> Hell, you can't even write in *American*: you can't say that the recipe
> for the 20¢ WobblyBurger™ is © 2012 WobblyBurgerWorld Inc.

[Quite OT but...] How do you type all this?
[Note: I grew up on APL so unlike Rick I am genuinely asking :-) ]

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5730.1329065...@python.org>,
Dennis Lee Bieber <wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:48:36 -0500, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> >As Steven D'Aprano pointed out, it was missing some commonly used US
> >symbols such as ¢ or ©.

That's interesting. When I wrote that, it showed on my screen as a cent
symbol and a copyright symbol. What I see in your response is an upper
case "A" with a hat accent (circumflex?) over it followed by a cent
symbol, and likewise an upper case "A" with a hat accent over it
followed by copyright symbol.

Oh, for the days of ASCII again :-)

Not to mention, of course, that I wrote <colon><dash><close-paren>, but
I fully expect some of you will be reading this with absurd clients
which turn that into some kind of smiley-face image.


> Any volunteers to create an Extended Baudot... Instead of "letter
> shift" and "number shift" we could have a generic "encoding shift" which
> uses the following characters to identify which 7-bit subset of Unicode
> is to be represented <G>

I think that's called UTF-8.

[Roy Smith]

In article
<e7f457b3-7d49-4c95...@s8g2000pbj.googlegroups.com>,

What I do (on a Mac) is open the Keyboard Viewer thingie and try various
combinations of shift-control-option-command-function until the thing
I'm looking for shows up on a keycap. A few of them I've got memorized
(for example, option-8 gets you a bullet €). I would imagine if you
commonly type in a language other than English, you would quickly
memorize the ones you use a lot.

Or, open the Character Viewer thingie and either hunt around the various
drill-down menus (North American Scripts / Canadian Aboriginal
Syllabics, for example) or type in some guess at the official unicode
name into the search box.

[Nick Dokos]

[Emacs speficic]

Many different ways of course, but in emacs, you can select e.g. the TeX input method
with C-x RET C-\ TeX RET.
which does all of the above symbols with the exception of the cent
symbol (or maybe I missed it) - you type the thing in the first column and you
get the thing in the second column

\pounds £
\'e é
\ae æ
\"o ö
^{TM} ™
\copyright ©

I gave up on the cent symbol and used ucs-insert (C-x 8 RET) which allows you to type
a name, in this case CENT SIGN to get ¢.

Nick

[Peter Pearson]

On 12 Feb 2012 09:12:57 GMT, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
> Suppose you're a fan of Russian punk bank Наӥв and you have a directory
> of their music.

Sigh. Banking ain't what it used to be. I'm sticking with
classical Muzak.

--
To email me, substitute nowhere->spamcop, invalid->net.

[alister]

Pan seems to be fine , they at least look like letters not just blocks




--
Appearances often are deceiving.
-- Aesop

[jmfauth]

There is so much to say on the subject, I do not know
where to start. Some points.

Today, Sunday, 12 February 2012, 90%, if not more, of the
Python applications supposed to work with text and I'm toying
with are simply not working. Two reasons:
1) Most of the devs understand nothing or not enough on the
field of the coding of the characters.
2) In gui applications, most of the devs understand
nothing or not enough in the keyboard keys/chars handling.

---

I know Python since version 1.5.2 or 1.5.6 (?). Among the
applications I wrote, my fun is in writing GUI interactive
interpreters with Python 2 or 3, tkinter, Tkinter, wxPython,
PySide, PyQt4 on Windows.

Believe or not, my interactive interpreters are the only
ones where I can enter text and where text is displayed
correctly. IDLE, wxPython/PyShell, DrPython, ... all
are failing. (I do not count console applications).

Python popularity? I have no popularity-meter. What I know:
I can not type French text in IDLE on Windows. It is like
this since ~ten years and I never saw any complain about
this. (The problem in bad programmation).

Ditto for PyShell in wxPython. I do not count, the number of
corrections I proposed. In one version, it takes me 18 months
until finally decided to propose a correction. During this
time, I never heard of the problem. (Now, it is broken
again).

---

Is there a way to fix this actual status?
- Yes, and *very easily*.

Will it be fixed?
- No, because there is no willingness to solve it.

---

Roy Smith's quote: "... that we'll all just be
using UTF-32, ..."

Considering PEP 393, Python is not taking this road.

---

How many devs know, one can not write text in French with
the iso-8859-1 coding? (see pep 393)

How can one explain, corporates like MS or Apple with their
cp1252 or mac-roman codings succeeded to know this?

Ditto for foundries (Adobe, LinoType, ...)

---

Python is 20 years old. It was developped with ascii in
mind. Python was not born, all this stuff was already
a no problem with Windows and VB.
Even a step higher, Windows was no born, this was a no
problem at DOS level (eg TurboPascal), 30 years ago!

Design mistake.

---

Python 2 introduced the <unicode> type. Very nice.
Problem. The introduction of the automatic coercion
ascii-"unicode", which somehow breaks everything.

Very bad design mistake. (In my mind, the biggest one).

---

One day, I fell on the web on a very old discussion
about Python related to the introduction of unicode in
Python 2. Something like:

Python core dev (it was VS or AP): "... lets go with ucs-4
and we have no problem in the future ...".

Look at the situation today.

---

And so one.

---

Conclusion. A Windows programmer is better served by
downloading VB.NET Express. A end Windows user is
better served with an application developped with VB.NET
Express.

I find somehow funny, Python is able to produce this:

>>> (1.1).hex()
'0x1.199999999999ap+0'
>>>

and on the other side, Python, Python applications,
are not able to deal correctly with text entering
and text displaying. Probably, the two most important
tasks a "computer" has to do!

jmf

PS I'm not a computer scientist, only a computer user.

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/12/2012 10:13 AM, Roy Smith wrote:

> Exactly.<soapbox class="wise-old-geezer">. ASCII was so successful
> at becoming a universal standard which lasted for decades,

I think you are overstating the universality and length. I used a
machine in the 1970s with 60-bit words that could be interpreted as 10
6-bit characters. IBM used EBCDIC at least into the 1980s. The UCLA
machine I used had a translator for ascii terminals that connected by
modems. I remember discussing the translation table with the man in
charge of it. Dedicated wordprocessing machines of the 70s and 80s *had*
to use something other than plain ascii, as it is inadequate for
business text, as opposed to pure computation and labeled number tables.
Whether they used extended ascii or something else, I have no idea.

Ascii was, however, as far as I know, the universal basis for the new
personal computers starting about 1975, and most importantly, for the
IBM PC. But even that actually used its version of extended ascii, as
did each wordprocessing program.

> people who
> grew up with it don't realize there was once any other way. Not just
> EBCDIC, but also SIXBIT, RAD-50, tilt/rotate, packed card records,
> and so on. Transcoding was a way of life, and if you didn't know what
> you were starting with and aiming for, it was hopeless.

But because of the limitation of ascii on a worldwide, as opposed to
American basis, we ended up with 100-200 codings for almost as many
character sets. This is because the idea of ascii was applied by each
nation or language group individually to their local situation.

> Kind of like now where we are again with Unicode.</soapbox>

The situation before ascii is like where we ended up *before* unicode.
Unicode aims to replace all those byte encoding and character sets with
*one* byte encoding for *one* character set, which will be a great
simplification. It is the idea of ascii applied on a global rather that
local basis.

Let me repeat. Unicode and utf-8 is a solution to the mess, not the
cause. Perhaps we should have a synonym for utf-8: escii, for Earthian
Standard Code for Information Interchange.

--
Terry Jan Reedy

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Terry Reedy <tjr...@udel.edu> wrote:
> The situation before ascii is like where we ended up *before* unicode.
> Unicode aims to replace all those byte encoding and character sets with
> *one* byte encoding for *one* character set, which will be a great
> simplification. It is the idea of ascii applied on a global rather that
> local basis.

Unicode doesn't deal with byte encodings; UTF-8 is an encoding, but so
are UTF-16, UTF-32. and as many more as you could hope for. But
broadly yes, Unicode IS the solution.

ChrisA

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5738.1329084...@python.org>,

Terry Reedy <tjr...@udel.edu> wrote:

> Let me repeat. Unicode and utf-8 is a solution to the mess, not the
> cause. Perhaps we should have a synonym for utf-8: escii, for Earthian
> Standard Code for Information Interchange.

I'm not arguing that Unicode is where we need to get to. Just trying to
give a little history.

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5739.1329084...@python.org>,

I could hope for one and only one, but I know I'm just going to be
disapointed. The last project I worked on used UTF-8 in most places,
but also used some C and Java libraries which were only available for
UTF-16. So it was transcoding hell all over the place.

Hopefully, we will eventually reach the point where storage is so cheap
that nobody minds how inefficient UTF-32 is and we all just start using
that. Life will be a lot simpler then. No more transcoding, a string
will just as many bytes as it is characters, and everybody will be happy
again.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:11:30 -0600, Andrew Berg wrote:

> On 2/12/2012 3:12 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> NTFS by default uses the UTF-16 encoding, which means the actual bytes
>> written to disk are \x1d\x040\x04\xe5\x042\x04 (possibly with a leading
>> byte-order mark \xff\xfe).
>
> That's what I meant. Those bytes will be interpreted consistently across
> all locales.

Right. But, that's not Unicode, it is an encoding of Unicode. Terminology
is important -- if we don't call things by the "right" names (or at least
agreed upon names) how can we communicate?

>> Windows has two separate APIs, one for "wide" characters, the other for
>> single bytes. Depending on which one you use, the directory will appear
>> to be called Наӥв or 0å2.
>
> Yes, and AFAIK, the wide API is the default. The other one only exists
> to support programs that don't support the wide API (generally, such
> programs were intended to be used on older platforms that lack that
> API).

I'm not sure that "default" is the right word, since (as far as I know)
both APIs have different spelling and the coder has to make the choice
whether to call function X or function Y. Perhaps you mean that Microsoft
encourages the wide API and makes the single-byte API available for
legacy reasons?

>> But in any case, we're not talking about the file name encoding. We're
>> talking about the contents of files.
>
> Okay then. As I stated, this has nothing to do with the OS since
> programs are free to interpret bytes any way they like.

Yes, but my point was that even if the developer thinks he can avoid the
problem by staying away from "Unicode files" coming from Linux and OS-X,
he can't avoid dealing with multiple code pages on Windows.

You are absolutely correct that this is *not* a cross-platform issue to
do with the OS, but some people may think it is.


--
Steven

[Dave Angel]

Keep your in-memory character strings as Unicode, and only
serialize(encode) them when they go to/from a device, or to/from
anachronistic code. Then the cost is realized at the point of the
problem. No different than when deciding how to serialize any other
data type. Do it only at the point of entry/exit of your program.

But as long as devices are addressed as bytes, or as anything smaller
than 32bit thingies, you will have encoding issues when writing to the
device, and decoding issues when reading. At the very least, you have
big-endian/little-endian ways to encode that UCS-4 code point.

[Ben Finney]

In GNU+Linux, I run the IBus daemon to manage different keyboard input
methods across all my applications consistently. That makes hundreds of
language-specific input methods available, and also many that are not
language-specific.

It's useful if I want to 英語の書面を書き中 type a passage of Japanese
with the ‘anthy’ input method, or likewise for any of the other
available language-specific input methods.

I normally have IBus presenting the ‘rfc1345’ input method. That makes
just about all keys input the corresponding character just as if no
input method were active. But when I type ‘&’ followed by a two- or
three-key sequence, it inputs the corresponding character from the
RFC 1345 mnemonics table:

& → &
P d → £
e ' → é
a e → æ
o : → ö
C t → ¢
T M → ™
C o → ©
" 6 → “
" 9 → ”
…


Those same characters are also available with the ‘latex’ input method,
if I'm familiar with LaTeX character entity names. (I'm not.)

--
\ “If [a technology company] has confidence in their future |
`\ ability to innovate, the importance they place on protecting |
_o__) their past innovations really should decline.” —Gary Barnett |
Ben Finney

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:11:46 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:

> In article <mailman.5730.1329065...@python.org>,
> Dennis Lee Bieber <wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:48:36 -0500, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>> >As Steven D'Aprano pointed out, it was missing some commonly used US
>> >symbols such as ¢ or ©.
>
> That's interesting. When I wrote that, it showed on my screen as a cent
> symbol and a copyright symbol. What I see in your response is an upper
> case "A" with a hat accent (circumflex?) over it followed by a cent
> symbol, and likewise an upper case "A" with a hat accent over it
> followed by copyright symbol.

Somebody's mail or news reader is either ignoring the message's encoding
line, or not inserting an encoding line. Either way, that's a bug.

> Oh, for the days of ASCII again :-)

I look forward to the day, probably around 2525, when everybody uses
UTF-32 always.



--
Steven

[Dave Angel]

On 02/12/2012 05:30 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:11:30 -0600, Andrew Berg wrote:
>
>> On 2/12/2012 3:12 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> <snip>

>>> Windows has two separate APIs, one for "wide" characters, the other for
>>> single bytes. Depending on which one you use, the directory will appear
>>> to be called Наӥв or 0å2.
>> Yes, and AFAIK, the wide API is the default. The other one only exists
>> to support programs that don't support the wide API (generally, such
>> programs were intended to be used on older platforms that lack that
>> API).
> I'm not sure that "default" is the right word, since (as far as I know)
> both APIs have different spelling and the coder has to make the choice
> whether to call function X or function Y. Perhaps you mean that Microsoft
> encourages the wide API and makes the single-byte API available for
> legacy reasons?
>
>

When I last looked, the pair of functions were equivalently available,
and neither one was named the way you'd expect. One had a suffix of A
and the other had a suffix of W (guess which was which). C header
definitions used #define to define the actual functions, and the
preprocessor effectively stuck A's on all of them or W's on all of
them. Very bulky, but buried in some MS header files.

Other languages were free to use either or both. VB used just the W
versions, as I presume java does.

But the interesting point was that for most of these functions, the A
versions were native on Win95-derived OS'es, while the W versions were
native on NT-derived OS's. There were translation DLL's which supplied
the secondary versions. So in the old days it was more efficient to use
the A versions. No longer true, since as far as I know, nobody that
still uses Win ME, Win98, or Win95 is targeted for much new programming.



--

DaveA

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 08:50:28 -0800, rusi wrote:

>> You can't say that it cost you £10 to courier your résumé to the head
>> office of Encyclopædia Britanica to apply for the position of Staff
>> Coördinator. (Admittedly, the umlaut on the second "o" looks a bit
>> stuffy and old-fashioned, but it is traditional English.)
>>
>> Hell, you can't even write in *American*: you can't say that the recipe
>> for the 20¢ WobblyBurger™ is © 2012 WobblyBurgerWorld Inc.
>
> [Quite OT but...] How do you type all this? [Note: I grew up on APL so
> unlike Rick I am genuinely asking :-) ]

In my case, I used the KDE application "KCharSelect". I manually hunt
through the tables for the character I want (which sucks), click on the
characters I want, and copy and paste them into my editor.

Back in Ancient Days when I ran Mac OS 6, I had memorised many keyboard
shortcuts for these things. Option-4 was the pound sign, I believe, and
Option-Shift-4 the cent sign. Or perhaps the other way around?


--
Steven

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:27:34 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:

> In article <mailman.5739.1329084...@python.org>,
> Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Terry Reedy <tjr...@udel.edu> wrote:
>> > The situation before ascii is like where we ended up *before*
>> > unicode. Unicode aims to replace all those byte encoding and
>> > character sets with *one* byte encoding for *one* character set,
>> > which will be a great simplification. It is the idea of ascii applied
>> > on a global rather that local basis.
>>
>> Unicode doesn't deal with byte encodings; UTF-8 is an encoding, but so
>> are UTF-16, UTF-32. and as many more as you could hope for. But broadly
>> yes, Unicode IS the solution.
>
> I could hope for one and only one, but I know I'm just going to be
> disapointed. The last project I worked on used UTF-8 in most places,
> but also used some C and Java libraries which were only available for
> UTF-16. So it was transcoding hell all over the place.

Um, surely the solution to that is to always call a simple wrapper
function to the UTF-16 code to handle the transcoding? What do the Design
Patterns people call it, a facade? No, an adapter. (I never remember the
names...)

Instead of calling library.foo() which only outputs UTF-16, write a
wrapper myfoo() which calls foo, captures its output and transcribes to
UTF-8. You have to do that once (per function), but now it works from
everywhere, so long as you remember to always call myfoo instead of foo.

> Hopefully, we will eventually reach the point where storage is so cheap
> that nobody minds how inefficient UTF-32 is and we all just start using
> that. Life will be a lot simpler then. No more transcoding, a string
> will just as many bytes as it is characters, and everybody will be happy
> again.

I think you mean 4 times as many bytes as characters. Unless you have 32
bit bytes :)


--
Steven

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/12/2012 2:52 PM, jmfauth wrote:

> Python popularity? I have no popularity-meter. What I know:
> I can not type French text in IDLE on Windows. It is like

I am pretty sure others have managed to. tk and hence idle handle the
entire BMP subset of unicode just fine once they get them. Except for
the apple version, which has just been fixed so French entry should
work. Showing characters on the screen requires an appropriate font.
http://bugs.python.org/issue4281 was the result of a font problem.

> this since ~ten years and I never saw any complain about
> this.

Neither have I, except for the issue above I just found. So there is
nothing obvious to fix.

If you have a problem, give the specifics here and lets see if someone
has a solution.

--
Terry Jan Reedy

[Roy Smith]

In article <4f384b6e$0$29986$c3e8da3$5496...@news.astraweb.com>,

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:

> > I could hope for one and only one, but I know I'm just going to be
> > disapointed. The last project I worked on used UTF-8 in most places,
> > but also used some C and Java libraries which were only available for
> > UTF-16. So it was transcoding hell all over the place.
>
> Um, surely the solution to that is to always call a simple wrapper
> function to the UTF-16 code to handle the transcoding? What do the Design
> Patterns people call it, a facade? No, an adapter. (I never remember the
> names...)

I am familiar with the concept. It was ICU. A very big library. Lots
of calls. I don't remember the details, I'm sure we wrote wrappers. It
was still a mess.

> > Hopefully, we will eventually reach the point where storage is so cheap
> > that nobody minds how inefficient UTF-32 is and we all just start using
> > that. Life will be a lot simpler then. No more transcoding, a string
> > will just as many bytes as it is characters, and everybody will be happy
> > again.
>
> I think you mean 4 times as many bytes as characters. Unless you have 32
> bit bytes :)

Yes, exactly.

[Christian Heimes]

Am 12.02.2012 23:07, schrieb Terry Reedy:
> But because of the limitation of ascii on a worldwide, as opposed to
> American basis, we ended up with 100-200 codings for almost as many
> character sets. This is because the idea of ascii was applied by each
> nation or language group individually to their local situation.

You really learn to appreciate unicode when you have to deal with mixed
languages in texts and old databases from the 70ties and 80ties.

I'm working with books that contain medieval German, old German, modern
German, English, French, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, ancient and modern
Greek, Rhaeto-Romanic, East European and more languages. Sometimes three
or four languages are used in a single book. Some books are more than
700 years old and contain glyphs that aren't covered by unicode yet.
Without unicode it would be virtually impossible to deal with it.

Metadata for these books come from old and proprietary databases and are
stored in a format that is optimized for magnetic tape. Most people will
never have heard about ISO-5426 or ANSEL encoding or about file formats
like MAB2, MARC or PICA. It took me quite some time to develop codecs to
encode and decode an old and partly undocumented variable multibyte
encodings that predates UTF-8 by about a decade. Of course every system
interprets the undocumented parts slightly different ...

Unicode and XML are bliss for metadata exchange and long term storage!

[Dave Angel]

On 02/12/2012 06:29 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:27:34 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:
>

>> <SNIP>

>> Hopefully, we will eventually reach the point where storage is so cheap
>> that nobody minds how inefficient UTF-32 is and we all just start using
>> that. Life will be a lot simpler then. No more transcoding, a string
>> will just as many bytes as it is characters, and everybody will be happy
>> again.
> I think you mean 4 times as many bytes as characters. Unless you have 32
> bit bytes :)
>
>

Until you have 32 bit bytes, you'll continue to have encodings, even if
only a couple of them.




--

DaveA

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Dave Angel <d...@davea.name> wrote:
> On 02/12/2012 06:29 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

>> I think you mean 4 times as many bytes as characters. Unless you have 32
>> bit bytes :)
>>
>>

> Until you have 32 bit bytes, you'll continue to have encodings, even if only
> a couple of them.

The advantage, though, is that you can always know how many bytes to
read for X characters. In ASCII, you allocate 80 bytes of storage and
you can store 80 characters. In UTF-8, if you want an 80-character
buffer, you can probably get away with allocating 240 characters...
but maybe not. In UTF-32, it's easy - just allocate 320 bytes and you
know you can store them. Also, you know exactly where the 17th
character is; in UTF-8, you have to count. That's a huge advantage for
in-memory strings; but is it useful on disk, where (as likely as not)
you're actually looking for lines, which you still have to scan for?
I'm thinking not, so it makes sense to use a smaller disk image than
UTF-32 - less total bytes means less sectors to read/write, which
translates fairly directly into performance.

ChrisA

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5750.1329094...@python.org>,

Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The advantage, though, is that you can always know how many bytes to
> read for X characters. In ASCII, you allocate 80 bytes of storage and
> you can store 80 characters. In UTF-8, if you want an 80-character
> buffer, you can probably get away with allocating 240 characters...
> but maybe not. In UTF-32, it's easy - just allocate 320 bytes and you
> know you can store them. Also, you know exactly where the 17th
> character is; in UTF-8, you have to count. That's a huge advantage for
> in-memory strings; but is it useful on disk, where (as likely as not)
> you're actually looking for lines, which you still have to scan for?
> I'm thinking not, so it makes sense to use a smaller disk image than
> UTF-32 - less total bytes means less sectors to read/write, which
> translates fairly directly into performance.

You might just write files compressed. My guess is that a typical
gzipped UTF-32 text file will be smaller than the same data stored as
uncompressed UTF-8.

[rusi]

On Feb 12, 10:36 pm, Nick Dokos <nicholas.do...@hp.com> wrote:

[OT warning]
I asked this on the emacs list:

No response there and the responses here are more helpful so asking
here.
My question there was emacs-specific. If there is some other app,
thats fine.

I have some bunch of sanskrit (devanagari) to type. It would be
easiest for me if I could have the English (roman) as well as the
sanskrit (devanagari).

For example using the devanagari-itrans input method I can write the
gayatri mantra using

OM bhUrbhuvaH suvaH
tatsaviturvarenyam
bhargo devasya dhImahi
dhiyo yonaH prachodayAt

and emacs produces *on the fly* (ie I cant see/edit the above)

ॐ भूर्भुवः सुवः
तत्सवितुर्वरेण्यम्
भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि
धियो योनः प्रचोदयात्

Can I do it in batch mode? ie write the first in a file and run some
command on it to produce the second?

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/12/2012 5:14 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Terry Reedy<tjr...@udel.edu> wrote:
>> The situation before ascii is like where we ended up *before* unicode.
>> Unicode aims to replace all those byte encoding and character sets with
>> *one* byte encoding for *one* character set, which will be a great
>> simplification. It is the idea of ascii applied on a global rather that
>> local basis.
>
> Unicode doesn't deal with byte encodings; UTF-8 is an encoding,

The Unicode Standard specifies 3 UTF storage formats* and 8 UTF
byte-oriented transmission formats. UTF-8 is the most common of all
encodings for web pages. (And ascii pages are utf-8 also.) It is the
only one of the 8 most of us need to much bother with. Look here for the
list
http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#U
and for details look in various places in
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/ch03.pdf

> but so are UTF-16, UTF-32.
> and as many more as you could hope for.

All the non-UTF 'as many more as you could hope for' encodings are not
part of Unicode.

* The new internal unicode scheme for 3.3 is pretty much a mixture of
the 3 storage formats (I am of course, skipping some details) by using
the widest one needed for each string. The advantage is avoiding
problems with each of the three. The disadvantage is greater internal
complexity, but that should be hidden from users. They will not need to
care about the internals. They will be able to forget about 'narrow'
versus 'wide' builds and the possible requirement to code differently
for each. There will only be one scheme that works the same on all
platforms. Most apps should require less space and about the same time.

--
Terry Jan Reedy

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5752.1329102...@python.org>,

All that is just fine, but what the heck are we going to do about ascii
art, that's what I want to know. Python just won't be the same in UTF-8.



/^\/^\
_|__| O|
\/ /~ \_/ \
\____|__________/ \
\_______ \
`\ \ \
| | \
/ / \
/ / \\
/ / \ \
/ / \ \
/ / _----_ \ \
/ / _-~ ~-_ | |
( ( _-~ _--_ ~-_ _/ |
\ ~-____-~ _-~ ~-_ ~-_-~ /
~-_ _-~ ~-_ _-~ - jurcy -
~--______-~ ~-___-~

[Ben Finney]

Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> writes:

> All that is just fine, but what the heck are we going to do about ascii
> art, that's what I want to know. Python just won't be the same in
> UTF-8.

If it helps, ASCII art *is* UTF-8 art. So it will be the same in UTF-8.

Or maybe you already knew that, and your sarcasm was lost with the high
bit.

--
\ “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that |
`\ divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of |
_o__) being correct.” —Niels Bohr (to Wolfgang Pauli), 1958 |
Ben Finney

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 12, 12:10 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 18:36:52 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:
> >> "I have a file containing text. I can open it in an editor and see it's
> >> nearly all ASCII text, except for a few weird and bizarre characters
> >> like £ © ± or ö. In Python 2, I can read that file fine. In Python 3 I
> >> get an error. What should I do that requires no thought?"
>
> >> Obvious answers:
>
> > the most obvious answer would be to read the file WITHOUT worrying about
> > asinine encoding.
>
> Your mad leet reading comprehension skillz leave me in awe Rick.

Same goes for your abstract reasoning skillz! You're attempting to
treat the problem, whilst ignoring the elephant in the room -- THE
DISEASE!.

Do you think that cost of healthcare is the problem? Do you think the
cost of healthcare insurance is the problem? NO! The problem is people
expect entitlements. If you can't afford healthcare, then you die. If
you can't afford food, then you starve. If you can't afford
prophylactics, then you will be sentenced to eighteen years of hell!
Maybe a charity will help you, or maybe a friend, or maybe a neighbor.
If not, then you suffer the fatal exception. Life sucks, deal with it!
You want to solve the healthcare problem then STOP TREATING PEOPLE WHO
DON'T HAVE INSURANCE! Problem solved! You are only born with one
guarantee; you will die, guaranteed! Any questions?

The problem with bytes is not encodings or OS's. Can you guess what
the REAL problem is? ..take all the time you need.

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem with bytes is not encodings or OS's. Can you guess what
> the REAL problem is? ..take all the time you need.

The REAL problem is trolls.

But they're such fun, and so cute when they get ranting...

ChrisA

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:48:54 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:

> Do you think that cost of healthcare is the problem? Do you think the
> cost of healthcare insurance is the problem? NO! The problem is people
> expect entitlements.

Entitlements? I work hard and pay my taxes. I *earned* that healthcare
that trolls like you call an entitlement. Damn straight it's an
entitlement -- I paid for it, I earned it, I'm entitled to it, and if you
try to steal if from me, expect a fight.

Socialised healthcare is a win-win system:

- the working class wins, because they get healthcare at a much cheaper
rate than they could otherwise afford

- bosses win, because they have reduced absenteeism, lower training costs
to replace workers who die, and fewer epidemics that threaten their own
families

- Wall Street wins, because productivity is increased due to better health

- pharmaceutical companies win, because even though their profits on
individual items are reduced, their increased sales more than make up for
it

- doctors win, because they spend more time getting paid to deal with
patients and less unproductive time on dealing with insurance companies

- the economy wins, because fewer people are bankrupted by simple medical
procedures

The only loss is for the insurers, who have to get an honest job. So why
on earth is anyone against socialised healthcare when it provably works
better than the US system?

Simple. To a certain mind, "win-win" is not a good thing, it is a bad
thing. "Win-win" implies that you might have to share the pie instead of
eating it all yourself, and to that sort of person, anything less than
ALL the pie might as well be nothing at all. What's the point of being
wealthy and powerful without having hungry, sick peons to lord over? How
will you know you have won unless others lose?

The inefficiencies (economic and moral) of the US private healthcare
system are not a bug, they are a feature. It is part of the war the 1% of
the 1% have been waging on the rest of society for the last 40 years.

> You are only born with one
> guarantee; you will die, guaranteed! Any questions?

Yes. Why haven't you moved to a libertarian paradise like Somalia yet?
You'd like it there. There are two sorts of people: those who can afford
their own private militia, and victims.


--
Steven

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 13, 2:05 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve

+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:48:54 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:
> > Do you think that cost of healthcare is the problem? Do you think the
> > cost of healthcare insurance is the problem? NO! The problem is people
> > expect entitlements.
>
> Entitlements? I work hard and pay my taxes. I *earned* that healthcare

> that [gentlemen] like you call an entitlement. Damn straight it's an

> entitlement -- I paid for it, I earned it, I'm entitled to it,

And just how much healthcare dollars are you entitled to exactly? Can
you put your entitlement into some form of monetary value?

And how can we ever make a system like this fair? If someone works for
30 years and pays a 30% tax rate and another works for 2 years and
pays 15%, then how do we delegate the fair share? The answer is you
can't delegate fairness in a system like this. The system of "i pay
taxes therfore i deserve a free heart transplant" is broken!

And don't forget, your tax dollars are not just for coving the cost of
healthcare. What about infrastructure, social security, welfare,
military, government bail-outs, bribe money to rouge states, earmarks,
bridges to nowhere, and and even planting trees on the main highways?
These things cost money you know!

How about instead of enriching the government by increasing taxes YOU
just live within your means? If you can afford healthcare, great! If
not, too bad.

> and if you
> try to steal if from me, expect a fight.

Steal what from you... you're stealing from everyone else! You're
expecting ME to cover YOUR healthcare. What's next? I should
supplement your income so you can you buy a summer home?

What about folks who gorge on sugar, saturated fats, and salt all
their lives with no regard for their own health? What happens when
they develop diabetes, heart disease, and cancer? Do you think the
measly little amount of taxes they payed (IF THEY PAYED AT ALL!) will
cover a heart transplant or cancer treatments? Who will pay when they
cannot?

What about the idiots who smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and/or
abuse drugs (prescription or otherwise). Should your tax dollars cover
these medical expenses? Who will pay when they cannot?

What about people who are too lazy to cook their children healthy
meals and instead rely on fast food and soda? What happens when those
same kids become morbidly obese? Why are we not charging these idiots
with child abuse? Who will pay when they cannot?

*Selfish Sam blubbers:* "I pay taxes, so the government needs to
subsidize my unhealthy lifestyle!"

But where does the "government money" come from Sam?
Sam: Taxes?
Very good Sam, and WHO pays taxes?
Sam: Citizens?
You're very smart Sam. And what do think will happen when the
government needs more money?
Sam: They will increase taxes?
Good boy Sam! Here is a treat. Now run along and fetch the newspaper.

Taxes are tranny. And you WANT to give them an excuse to increase
taxes! We are doomed!

> Socialised healthcare is a win-win system:

Sure, for the degenerates!

> - the working class wins, because they get healthcare at a much cheaper
> rate than they could otherwise afford

Healthcare is expensive. Do you want a minimum wage doctor curing your
ills? And the frivolous lawsuits are not bringing the costs down
either.

> - bosses win, because they have reduced absenteeism, lower training costs
> to replace workers who die, and fewer epidemics that threaten their own
> families

BS! With free healthcare, those who would have allowed their immune
system fight off the flu, now take off from work, visit a local
clinic, and get pumped full of antibiotics so they can create a new
strain of antibiotic resistant flu virus! Thanks free healthcare!

> - Wall Street wins, because productivity is increased due to better health

Oh yes, and wall street is the hope of the future. Thank god they are
winning. Thank god they are healthy enough to rob us for another day.
Thank god!

> - pharmaceutical companies win, because even though their profits on
> individual items are reduced, their increased sales more than make up for
> it

This is the same thing that happened to the funiture industry. They
call it the "Assembly Line". I don't know how you feel, but i think
mass produced furniture sucks a big fat Python!

> - doctors win, because they spend more time getting paid to deal with
> patients and less unproductive time on dealing with insurance companies

Doctors have minions for those tasks. Do you actually believe doctors
are on the phone with insurance companies? They are at the freaking
golf course!

> - the economy wins, because fewer people are bankrupted by simple medical
> procedures

It sucks that medical can be so expensive, and i am all for reducing
the costs. However, we cannot implement a system that rewards the
slothful degenerates of society on the backs of the hard working.
Evolution knows how to handle degenerates.

> The only loss is for the insurers, who have to get an honest job. So why
> on earth is anyone against socialised healthcare when it provably works
> better than the US system?

If you look around the world, you will see that socialized heathcare
has been around for a long time. Let me know when it "solves the
healthcare problem"... psst, i won't be holding my breath!

> Simple. To a certain mind, "win-win" is not a good thing, it is a bad
> thing. "Win-win" implies that you might have to share the pie instead of
> eating it all yourself, and to that sort of person, anything less than
> ALL the pie might as well be nothing at all.

That's the chant of the folks who have no capacity to think for
themselves. It's also used by the "controllers" to incite the foolish
masses through emotional rhetoric. The fact is, socialized medicine is
SOMEONE ELSE paying for YOUR healthcare. Socialized medicine is YOU
leaching off the backs of others. Here's a novel idea, subsidize your
own damn healthcare!

You are born with rights. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Healthcare care is NOT a right, healthcare is a privileged. Driving a
car is not a right, it is a privileged. Procreation should be a
privilege, however sadly for our collective evolution, it's seems to
be a right :(

> The inefficiencies (economic and moral) of the US private healthcare
> system are not a bug, they are a feature. It is part of the war the 1% of
> the 1% have been waging on the rest of society for the last 40 years.

What is the goal of the war? Do you really think the one percent want
to destroy the working class? If they did manage to destroy us, then
who would clean their house, take out there garbage, work in the
factories and sweat shops, shine their shoes, wash their cars, wipe
their @$$? Who would create that next new cool IPhone app?

Look, i hate super rich, arrogant people just as much i hate selfish
people. I think you need to take a step back from your emotional
temper tantrum and smell the $hit your shoveling! It is my god given
right to live free of tyranny, not be enslaved by taxes so i can
subsidize you lifespan. Not so you can live to be 104 whilst trying to
suck every last breath out of an oxygen canister. No, you live and die
by your own choices and the cards that were dealt to you. Leave me the
freak out of your selfish card game!

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:01:59 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:

> Evolution knows how to handle degenerates.

And yet here you still are.


--
Steven

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 13, 10:12 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve

Embrace the perfection of evolution, and both our needs shall be met!

[Andrew Berg]

On 2/12/2012 10:19 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
> If it helps, ASCII art *is* UTF-8 art. So it will be the same in UTF-8.

As will non-ASCII text art:

　 ／l、
ﾞ（ﾟ､ ｡ ７
　l、ﾞ ~ヽ
　 じしf_, )ノ

--
CPython 3.2.2 | Windows NT 6.1.7601.17640

[Ian Kelly]

I hate being suckered in by trolls, but this paragraph demands a response.

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:01 AM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You are born with rights. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
> Healthcare care is NOT a right, healthcare is a privileged.

If you deprive a person of access to healthcare, and they die, then
you have deprived them of life and thus violated the very rights that
you just stated they had.

In any case, taking that phrase from the Declaration of Independence
and holding it out as an exhaustive list of rights is moronic. First,
because it's not even a legal document -- it's only a statement of
high-minded classical liberalism, albeit a historically important and
influential one. Second, because it actually states "We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
**AMONG** these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The
phrasing obviously implies that there are other human rights besides
the three examples listed. After all, the purpose of the document was
not to enumerate all human rights, but to air a list of grievances
against King George and assert the right to revolt against him.

Incidentally, "not being required to pay taxes" is not something that
the founding fathers would have considered a human right, taxation
being necessary to support government and representative government
(at least according to the Declaration of Independence) being
necessary to secure those rights.

> Procreation should be a
> privilege, however sadly for our collective evolution, it's seems to
> be a right :(

There is a word for the philosophy that procreation should be a
privilege reserved for those with good genes: eugenics. Welcome to
fascism, Rick.

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 5:38 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "... Rights, that

> **AMONG** these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

AMONG our rights are such elements as Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of
Happiness, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Founding
Fathers.... I'll come in again.

(Does that drag this back on topic? Almost? Vain attempt to at least
look like it's on topic?)

ChrisA

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 13, 12:38 pm, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I hate being suckered in by trolls, but this paragraph demands a response.
>
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:01 AM, Rick Johnson
>

> <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > You are born with rights. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
> > Healthcare care is NOT a right, healthcare is a privileged.
>
> If you deprive a person of access to healthcare, and they die, then
> you have deprived them of life and thus violated the very rights that

> you just stated they had. And finally the "pursuit of happiness". Notice the wording here: "pursuit". You have a right to PURSUE happiness, not a right to steal it. Also, you are guaranteed happiness, only the right to purse your version of happiness -- so long as that version does not interfere with others rights.

You have a right to life, NOT a right to unnaturally extend your
lifetime by stealing the fruits of other people's labor (in this case:
money). You have a right to be free, but NOT to quell the freedom of
others so that YOU may benefit (in this case: taxation).

Healthy people do not need healthcare very often, and in the rare
cases when they do, they don't bog down the system because their
bodies are strong. Why are their bodies strong? Because healthy people
eat correctly, healthy people exercise, therefore, healthy people have
correctly functioning immune systems -- of course quality genes always
help!

> In any case, taking that phrase from the Declaration of Independence
> and holding it out as an exhaustive list of rights is moronic.  First,
> because it's not even a legal document -- it's only a statement of
> high-minded classical liberalism, albeit a historically important and
> influential one.  Second, because it actually states "We hold these
> truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
> are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
> **AMONG** these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  The
> phrasing obviously implies that there are other human rights besides
> the three examples listed.  After all, the purpose of the document was
> not to enumerate all human rights, but to air a list of grievances
> against King George and assert the right to revolt against him.



> Incidentally, "not being required to pay taxes" is not something that
> the founding fathers would have considered a human right, taxation
> being necessary to support government and representative government
> (at least according to the Declaration of Independence) being
> necessary to secure those rights.

I never stated that taxation violated anyone's "human rights". And i
personally believe that "some" amount of taxation is a necessary in a
democratic society. How else would the government pay the bills? Rule
of law, infrastructure, national security (just to name a few) are all
subjects that the government must handle for the sake of society as a
whole.

HOWEVER, healthcare is not a concern of the greater society, but only
the individual -- with the exception of contagious disease of course,
which effects us all! Cardiovascular diseases, cancers, cirrhosis,
kidney failure, stroke, diabetes, etc..., are NOT contagious but
continue to be a drain on healthcare costs. In fact, most of these
problems are the results of an unhealthy lifestyle.

Listen, I have no objection to folks living an unhealthy lifestyle. I
say, if that's what makes you happy, GO FOR IT!. However, i'll be
damned if i am going to subsidize their healthcare because now they
are dying and can't afford the medical bills.

Likewise if someone gets hit by a bus... was the person j-walking? If
so, too bad. Ride a motorcycle without a helmet and get a concussion,
too bad. Drink and drive and then end up in a coma, too bad! You play
with fire and you get burned! You kick a bear in the ass and you get
eaten. You stick your head in a crocodiles mouth and you suffer the
consequences! You are not fit to survive in this universe. You were
given fear for a reason. You were given pain for a reason. Those who
refuse to learn are culled from the herd.

> > Procreation should be a
> > privilege, however sadly for our collective evolution, it's seems to
> > be a right :(
>
> There is a word for the philosophy that procreation should be a
> privilege reserved for those with good genes: eugenics.

No, the word is evolution; which means: "survival of the fittest".

Listen, i will be the first to admit that evolution is VERY unfair to
those among us who have a poor gene pool. Poor genes are not our
fault. We did not get to CHOOSE our genes, or our parents, or our
country of origin, or etc, etc, etc! But these ARE the cards we were
dealt as individuals of a species. That last sentence is VERY
important: "individuals of a species". We like to think that our
individual lives matter in the greater scheme of things, but i can
assure you we don't matter.

Anyone who has studied animal behavior knows that only the strongest
males are allowed to mate. Why is this? Because strength can only
manifest itself in an individual with quality genes. An indiviual who
is healthy. What all the whiners want to do is strengthen the
degenerates. You want to circumvent evolution and devolve as a species
for nothing more than the sake of your own selfishness.

I can however tell you that what DOES matter is the continued
improvement of the base gene pool. Yes, this improvement comes at a
cost; the cost of the individual. Those with quality genes will reap
the rewards, likewise, those with crap genes will not. Evolution does
not care about you and how long your miserable little life will last,
or if you're going to get that new Apple device for Christmas, or how
many shoes are in your closet, or what brand underwear you choose to
cradle your loins with!

Your measly little 60-100 years of breathing means nothing against the
eons of evolution of individuals within species. YOU are pawn of the
Human species and nothing more. And the Human species is a pawn of
biological lifeforms. When (or if) you finally come to grips with that
grim reality you will be ready to transcend this life -- some make the
connection early, others make the connection on their deathbeds,
others not at all.

> Welcome to fascism, Rick.

Don't try to append me onto a specific ideology structure just because
that group happens to support ONE of my beliefs. I carry no political
or ideological "membership cards" in my pocket. My mind is free of the
boundaries that confine most of the Human species.

But go on falsely believing your little puny life matters. Go on
believing in your worn out traditions and selfish languages and
cultures. Go on believing that humans will be inhabiting this rock in
the next 1000 years, or this universe in the next 10,000 -- because
the enlightened few will have transcended into the mind hive and your @
$$ will be glued to Terra firma forever!

[Chris Angelico]

Rick, you are either...

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can however tell you that what DOES matter is the continued
> improvement of the base gene pool. Yes, this improvement comes at a
> cost; the cost of the individual. Those with quality genes will reap
> the rewards, likewise, those with crap genes will not.

... a Nazi/Fascist/Commie mutant traitor, or...

> But go on falsely believing your little puny life matters. Go on
> believing in your worn out traditions and selfish languages and
> cultures. Go on believing that humans will be inhabiting this rock in
> the next 1000 years, or this universe in the next 10,000 -- because
> the enlightened few will have transcended into the mind hive and your @
> $$ will be glued to Terra firma forever!

... the Borg. I'm not sure which is worse.

Hmm, I think I just godwinned this thread. But at least I could couple
it with a Paranoia reference.

ChrisA

[Mark Lawrence]

On 13/02/2012 21:01, Rick Johnson wrote:

> Healthy people do not need healthcare very often, and in the rare
> cases when they do, they don't bog down the system because their
> bodies are strong. Why are their bodies strong? Because healthy people
> eat correctly, healthy people exercise, therefore, healthy people have
> correctly functioning immune systems -- of course quality genes always
> help!

Please explain why previously healthy people get struck down with Common
Fatigue Syndrome amongst other things.

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[Michael Torrie]

On 02/13/2012 09:01 AM, Rick Johnson wrote:
> Look, i hate super rich, arrogant people just as much i hate selfish
> people.

But wait, Rick. You are a man of contradictions. We all are, but you
seem to bluster on and on more about it than most. Firstly, to *hate*
anyone, super-rich, arrogant, or not, _is_ selfish by definition. Also,
while I accept that you do not see yourself as arrogant, there are
others on this list, who are not particularly arrogant, who read your
posts as occasionally being extremely arrogant. For example, your post
mocking people for using English in ways that you do not personally
approve. Maybe this is just an artifact of the limitations of the
written word.

Now to the second contradiction. You said that one way to fix health
care costs would be to deny it to anyone who could not afford health
care insurance. Put in another way, health care should only go to those
that can afford to pay for the insurance or care, and not the
free-loaders. Is that not what you said? Thus a "super rich" person
should be commended as he will be able to afford health care without
burdening anyone else in society. Does your hatred for super-rich,
arrogant, people mean that you believe there is an acceptable dollar
value for the wealth a person should morally be able to amass?

All of this reminds me that I've always wanted to ask you something.
After reading your many posts over the last couple of years, I am
curious. What do you do for your career? Are you a professional
software developer?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:01:05 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:

> Healthy people do not need healthcare very often

Healthy people don't need healthcase AT ALL.

By definition, once you need healthcare, you are no longer healthy.

Your faith in the magic of "immune system" is touching, but one wonders
how "immune system" will save people who have been hit by a car.


Rick, isn't it time for you to go back to forking Python so that the
adoring silent majority who agrees with you can abandon this cesspool of
inefficient Python code and use your awesome new version? Please don't
disappoint your millions of fans!


--
Steven

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 13, 3:46 pm, Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/13/2012 09:01 AM, Rick Johnson wrote:
>
> > Look, i hate super rich, arrogant people just as much i hate selfish
> > people.
>
> But wait, Rick.  You are a man of contradictions.  We all are, but you
> seem to bluster on and on more about it than most.  Firstly, to *hate*
> anyone, super-rich, arrogant, or not, _is_ selfish by definition.

Not necessarily. But i will admit that i did not choose my words
correctly.

I don't "hate" people simply BECAUSE they are rich. Just like i don't
hate people simply because they are poor. However i DO hate what the
super rich people BECOME. They become blind to their own position in
the universe and instead start to believe the universe revolves around
them. When their daily lives are consumed with vanity, and they lose
all appreciation for the value of money. Yes, they have become
something NOT to aspire to.

But how much is too much?

Good question, and the answer is ALWAYS subjective isn't it? A child
might think $20 dollars is a lot of money. A homeless person might
think someone who has a new model car is rich and not struggling. Same
goes in the opposite direction. A rich man might choose suicide over
life if confronted with the possibility of surviving on $40,000 a
year. However, as we know, many folks survive on much less than that
-- some even pretend to be happy!

Can there be a specific amount wherein if you exceed that amount THEN
you are living in excess? I believe there is a specific amount,
however it is constantly changing depending on the current state of
employment and wages. My equation looks like:

# Py>=3.0
py> sum(earner.get_income(2012) for earner in earners2012) /
len(earners2012)
average_income

Once you exceed that amount you are robbing your fellow man. How can
you justify making more than your fair share UNLESS someone offers
their work load to YOU? You can't. You are living in excess. And for
those who think the average_income is too small, well then, it's time
to implement population control!

The fact is, we have far too many people living beyond their needs. We
have people buying houses they can't afford and then blaming the bank
for some how "tricking" them. They don't have the scruples to accept
the blame!

Take a look around man. The world is in death throes. World wide
economic collapse is upon us. And how did we get here? Entitlements:
which is just another manifestation of selfishness. Look at Greece.
Look at Europe. America YOU are next!

> Put in another way, health care should only go to those
> that can afford to pay for the insurance or care, and not the
> free-loaders.

Yes. Healthcare is a luxury available only to those who can afford it.
If you can't afford healthcare, then visit a REAL charity hospital
(not one subsidized by taxpayers!). A real charity is subsidized by
caring folks who want to help their fellow man -- even if to only
extend his suffering a few more days, months, or years.

> Thus a "super rich" person
> should be commended as he will be able to afford health care without
> burdening anyone else in society.

"commend" is a strong word. I don't think paying your debts requires a
pat on the back. If you have children, then you are required to raise
them, you don't get brownie points for raising your children, it's
your job! Same for debts.

> Does your hatred for super-rich,
> arrogant, people mean that you believe there is an acceptable dollar
> value for the wealth a person should morally be able to amass?

see above equation for enlightenment ^^^

> What do you do for your career?  Are you a professional
> software developer?

Why? Do you need the services of a professional software developer?

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 13, 6:19 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve

+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:

> Your faith in the magic of "immune system" is touching, but one wonders
> how "immune system" will save people who have been hit by a car.

Why do you assume that someone hit by a car is a victim? This mindset
is why you (and others like you) cannot understand the REAL problem we
face. The problem that is destroying the world as we speak.

What if you where driving the car and someone ran out from behind a
large truck? (that's called "jaywalking" BTW!) What if you had no time
to stop? Who's to blame: the driver or the rebel pedestrian? Streets
are no place for walking, and sidewalks no place for driving.

Q: But what if the pedestrian had right-of-way?
A: Then the driver (or driver's insurance) would be responsible for
medical bills.

Q: But what if the driver has no money or no insurance
A: Then he NEVER should have been driving in the first place! He made
a really stupid decision! So sell all his belongings at auction and/or
force him into hard labor until the debt is re-paid!

I have no problem providing REAL emergency care for my fellow man who
might find themselves involved in an accident, or an unlucky victim of
violence requiring medical attention -- as long as the accident/
violence was not his fault or caused by his own stupidity! I think
anyone who is human would agree with that. HOWEVER, as i have stated
before, poor health caused by poor life choices is no excuse for free
healthcare. These sloths are the people bankrupting the system!

[Ian Kelly]

[Reply sent off-list, partly because this is way off-topic, but also
because python-list rejected my response as spam]

[Michael Torrie]

On 02/13/2012 05:39 PM, Rick Johnson wrote:
> Why? Do you need the services of a professional software developer?

Do you have some to offer?

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> # Py>=3.0
> py> sum(earner.get_income(2012) for earner in earners2012) /
> len(earners2012)
> average_income
>
> Once you exceed that amount you are robbing your fellow man. How can
> you justify making more than your fair share UNLESS someone offers
> their work load to YOU? You can't. You are living in excess. And for
> those who think the average_income is too small, well then, it's time
> to implement population control!

My equation looks something like this:

# Brain >= 0,1
brain> Your contribution to society / Society's contribution to you

This value should be able to exceed 1.0 across the board. In fact, if
it doesn't, then as a society we're moving backward.

Rick, what's YOUR ratio?

Oh wait, you mightn't be able to run that code. You may need to
download an upgraded brain.

ChrisA

[jmfauth]

On 13 fév, 04:09, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote:
>
>
> * The new internal unicode scheme for 3.3 is pretty much a mixture of
> the 3 storage formats (I am of course, skipping some details) by using
> the widest one needed for each string. The advantage is avoiding
> problems with each of the three. The disadvantage is greater internal
> complexity, but that should be hidden from users. They will not need to
> care about the internals. They will be able to forget about 'narrow'
> versus 'wide' builds and the possible requirement to code differently
> for each. There will only be one scheme that works the same on all
> platforms. Most apps should require less space and about the same time.
>
> --

Python 2 was built for ascii users. Now, Python 3(.3) is
*optimized* for the ascii users.

And the rest of the crowd? Not so sure, French users
(among others) who can not write their texts will
iso-8859-1/latin1 will be very happy.

No doubts, it will work. Is this however the correct
approach?

jmf

[John O'Hagan]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:01:05 -0800 (PST)
Rick Johnson <rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 13, 12:38 pm, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I hate being suckered in by trolls, but this paragraph demands a response.

Ditto...

> > On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:01 AM, Rick Johnson
> >
> > <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > You are born with rights. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
> > > Healthcare care is NOT a right, healthcare is a privileged.

[...]

> HOWEVER, healthcare is not a concern of the greater society, but only
> the individual -- with the exception of contagious disease of course,

[...snip half-baked, social-Darwinist, "there-is-no-such-thing-as-society",
naive U.S.-capitalist-libertarian drivel...]

> > > Procreation should be a
> > > privilege, however sadly for our collective evolution, it's seems to
> > > be a right :(
> >
> > There is a word for the philosophy that procreation should be a
> > privilege reserved for those with good genes: eugenics.
>
> No, the word is evolution; which means: "survival of the fittest".
>

Don't try to hijack real science to bolster a repugnant ideology.
Neither Herbert Spencer nor Darwin meant that phrase the way you do.

[...snip egregious, self-serving display of ignorance on the subjects of
evolution and genetics...]

>
> > Welcome to fascism, Rick.
>
> Don't try to append me onto a specific ideology structure just because
> that group happens to support ONE of my beliefs. I carry no political

[...blah blah...]

It's called duck-typing.

I somewhat optimistically implore you, Rick, to do some basic research on your
chosen subjects. Failing that (almost certainly), here are three simple points
which debunk your agenda (and that of the U.S. Republican Right):

1. Publicly-funded healthcare is both cheaper and more effective than
privatised systems. It's also the right thing to do (i.e. you don't have
to stand by while someone dies because their illness is "their fault").
Which makes it a win-win-win.

2. The recent economic problems were not triggered by "degenerates" (are you
actually talking about homosexuals here, or just in the more general,
McCathyist sense?), but in fact by the operations of the same unregulated
markets you are advocating.

3. The central fallacy of social Darwinism is the misapprehension that because
natural selection occurs in nature, human society _should_ also work this
way. This is a failure to acknowledge the is/ought problem, and is usually
compounded (Rick is no exception) by the equally mistaken view that there exist
"superior" individuals whose possession of a "quality gene-pool" entitles them
to survival - an entitlement that is encroached upon by inferior sorts who take
up space by insisting on not dying. Can you guess in which group those who hold
this view place themselves?

In fact, a gene pool is held by a species, not an individual, and the
maintenance of its diversity is essential for long term-survival. And to the
great disappointment of those looking for a justification of dog-eat-dog, one
of the main drivers of evolution is not competition, but adapting to new
environments to _avoid_ competition. I'm told the Spanish have a saying
which translates as "dogs don't eat dogs".

Genetics is complicated. Switching one gene on switches others off in
unpredictable ways, people choose mates by unfathomable processes, good-looking
geniuses have dumb, ugly children and vice-versa. This is why eugenics projects
are doomed to failure. They are also morally wrong, which is another win-win.

If some featureless fungus, toxic to all other living things, engulfed the
globe, would that make it "superior"? Of course, not, it merely survived.

Considerations of what _should_ happen, of superiority and quality, are human,
social concerns. We are humans, so they are important to us. But they have
nothing to do with genetics or evolution.

Social Darwinism is merely a psuedo-scientific attempt to justify inequity and
class divides. Furthermore, it is completely dead outside the U.S. - ironically
the only developed nation where real Darwinism is still seriously questioned.

[...]

> Go on believing that humans will be inhabiting this rock in
> the next 1000 years, or this universe in the next 10,000 -- because
> the enlightened few will have transcended into the mind hive and your @
> $$ will be glued to Terra firma forever!

Now that is some crazy shit! Maybe L. Ron _is_ still alive...


Regards,

John

[Tim Wintle]

(Sorry for top-posting this bit, but I think it's required before the
rest of my response)

At the risk of wading into this from a UK citizen's perspective:

You're imagining a public healthcare system as if it were private.

Imagine you go to a doctor and say "I've got the flu, can you give me
antibiotics".

In a Private healthcare system:

* The doctor gets paid for retaining a client.
* He is incentivised to do what you request.
... so he gives you the antibiotics.

In a Public healthcare system:
* The doctor is paid no matter what.
* His job is to stop the population becoming ill.
* By reducing illnesses he reduces his workload, without reducing his
wage

... so he'll only give you antibiotics if he feels you are at serious
risk, and giving you antibiotics carries less risk for the population
than the risk of the population getting immunities.

Same goes for surgery etc.

On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 08:01 -0800, Rick Johnson wrote:
> And just how much healthcare dollars are you entitled to exactly? Can
> you put your entitlement into some form of monetary value?
>
> And how can we ever make a system like this fair? If someone works for
> 30 years and pays a 30% tax rate and another works for 2 years and
> pays 15%, then how do we delegate the fair share?

If your children are educated privately then should you still be paying
taxes for education?

If you work for/bank with a company that doesn't need to be bailed out,
then should you still pay tax for that?

If you never need benefits (welfare) then should your taxes be paying
for that?

you can use that same argument for everything that taxes pay for - the
only logical conclusion of that argument is anarchy (i.e. no taxes, and
no government).

If you are an anarchist then that's a different argument all together
(not saying it doesn't have intellectual validity).

<snip>

> Healthcare is expensive. Do you want a minimum wage doctor curing your
> ills? And the frivolous lawsuits are not bringing the costs down
> either.

It's so expensive because of the marketing, and because of all the
middle-men.

A public health system doesn't need to do that marketing.

They also don't need to put up with people who aren't seriously ill - I
don't know how long your private appointments are, but here in the UK a
standard doctor's appointment is 5-10 minutes. If they decide you're
actually ill they may extend that.

> > - bosses win, because they have reduced absenteeism, lower training costs
> > to replace workers who die, and fewer epidemics that threaten their own
> > families
>
> BS! With free healthcare, those who would have allowed their immune
> system fight off the flu, now take off from work, visit a local
> clinic, and get pumped full of antibiotics so they can create a new
> strain of antibiotic resistant flu virus! Thanks free healthcare!

See my comments at the top.

[Duncan Booth]

Rick Johnson <rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:

> BS! With free healthcare, those who would have allowed their immune
> system fight off the flu, now take off from work, visit a local
> clinic, and get pumped full of antibiotics so they can create a new
> strain of antibiotic resistant flu virus! Thanks free healthcare!

Anyone who can write 'antibiotic resistant flu virus' as though they
believe it really needs to read some elementary books about disease.

Here's a clue: No flu viruses are treatable with antibiotics. In some cases
antibiotics may be useful for flu patients to treat secondary bacterial
infections, but they are not effective against viruses.

--
Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com

[Devin Jeanpierre]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 6:31 AM, Duncan Booth
<duncan...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> Here's a clue: No flu viruses are treatable with antibiotics.

Oh my god we're too late! Now they're ALL resistant!

-- Devin

[rusi]

On Feb 13, 9:01 pm, Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> And just how much healthcare dollars are you entitled to exactly? Can
> you put your entitlement into some form of monetary value?

Rick hats off to you man -- you are damn good! Did you study at a top-
troll-school?
eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMEe7JqBgvg

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 14, 2:41 am, John O'Hagan <resea...@johnohagan.com> wrote:
>
> 1. Publicly-funded healthcare is both cheaper and more effective than
> privatised systems. It's also the right thing to do (i.e. you don't have
> to stand by while someone dies because their illness is "their fault").

So you have no problem paying the medical bills of people who overeat
sugar, salt, and fat; refuse to put down the ho-ho's; and get a little
exercise? If so, then give to charity. Why do you need to FORCE me
(and others) to pay for your experiment of "degenerate eugenics"?

> 2. The recent economic problems were not triggered by "degenerates" (are you
> actually talking about homosexuals here, or just in the more general,
> McCathyist sense?)

WTF does homosexuality have to do with this conversation? I am talking
about lazy/slothful, drug/alcohol abusing, junk food eating, self-
induced illiterates, techno-phobic Luddite loving lemmings. Look, i
don't care how you want to live YOUR life, just leave me and my money
the hell out of it!

>, but in fact by the operations of the same unregulated
> markets you are advocating.

I am well aware of the sins of wall street and the ruling "corporate
class" (Greed.inc). That is half the problem, yes. However, you cannot
ignore the fact that we are spending trillions around the globe
supporting degenerates.

Look at Detroit MI. People like to blame GM for the state of the city
but GM is only a very small part of the problem. The REAL problem is
sleazy politicians and infections entitlements/welfare. When you crush
the tax payers with more and more tyrannical taxation to pay for your
entitlement programs, the taxpayers leave town; but the welfare
recipients stay! Why the heck would they quit a good thing? However,
now you find yourself in a major pickle. With the taxpayers gone,
who's going to fund the entitlement programs? NOBODY! The whole house
of cards comes crumbling down!

Of course i'm probably just wasting my time trying to educate you.
You'll just blab on and on about how evil i am for not paying other
people's bills so they can watch there hero degenerates on Jersey
Shore.

> 3. The central fallacy of social Darwinism is the misapprehension that because
> natural selection occurs in nature, human society _should_ also work this
> way.

I NEVER said we should adopt such a society. That is anarchy. And
anarchy will NEVER move us forward as a species.

> This is a failure to acknowledge the is/ought problem, and is usually
> compounded (Rick is no exception) by the equally mistaken view that there exist
> "superior" individuals whose possession of a "quality gene-pool" entitles them
> to survival - an entitlement that is encroached upon by inferior sorts who take
> up space by insisting on not dying. Can you guess in which group those who hold
> this view place themselves?

You'd be surprised which group i reside in. I know my place; but do
you know yours?

> Genetics is complicated. Switching one gene on switches others off in
> unpredictable ways, people choose mates by unfathomable processes, good-looking
> geniuses have dumb, ugly children and vice-versa. This is why eugenics projects
> are doomed to failure. They are also morally wrong, which is another win-win.

There is nothing wrong with denying degenerates the right to
reproduce. Would you allow a crack head to reproduce? How about
someone who carries a virus/illness/deadly defect for which there is
no cure and the virus/illness/deadly defect will be passed on to the
child? What if you knew without a doubt the baby would be born with
two heads, or mentally incapacitated, or brain dead, or etc...? Would
you allow the procreation anyway simply because people have a right to
be selfish?

What if the couple was healthy but had poor parenting skills, or
cannot feed the child, or cannot cloth the child, or etc...? Would you
allow the procreation anyway simply because people have a right to be
selfish?

What abut people who go around making babies but refuse to care for
them at all? I mean, birth control has been around for some time, but
we can't force degenerates to use it! Would you allow the procreation
anyway simply because people have a right to be selfish?

> If some featureless fungus, toxic to all other living things, engulfed the
> globe, would that make it "superior"? Of course, not, it merely survived.

I love when people contradict themselves in the same sentence -- makes
my job much easier!

> Considerations of what _should_ happen, of superiority and quality, are human,
> social concerns. We are humans, so they are important to us. But they have
> nothing to do with genetics or evolution.

Really??? I think you need to spend more time ruminating on the
subject. You can stick your head in the sand if you like, but
technology will advance with or without you. Humans will be cloned.
Humans will be genetically engineered. Humans will employ eugenics to
sculpt the gene pool. It is our destiny to use our intelligence to
drive our own evolution at an ever accelerating rate. To NOT use that
power would be to spit in the face of evolution itself!

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 14, 2:41 am, John O'Hagan <resea...@johnohagan.com> wrote:
>> This is a failure to acknowledge the is/ought problem, and is usually
>> compounded (Rick is no exception) by the equally mistaken view that there exist
>> "superior" individuals whose possession of a "quality gene-pool" entitles them
>> to survival - an entitlement that is encroached upon by inferior sorts who take
>> up space by insisting on not dying. Can you guess in which group those who hold
>> this view place themselves?
>
> You'd be surprised which group i reside in. I know my place; but do
> you know yours?

If you truly believe that only the best should be allowed to survive
and that you are not of the best, then the logical thing to do is to
immediately destroy yourself. Oddly enough, though, I don't see many
eugenics proponents committing mass suicide for the benefit of the
gene pool.

> There is nothing wrong with denying degenerates the right to
> reproduce.

Actually there is; I'm fairly sure that I wouldn't have been born if
such policies had been in place, and I strongly suspect that you
wouldn't have either. There was a country in the 20th century that
adopted a lot of the sorts of policies you're talking about, and it's
such a sensitive topic with MANY people that I'm not going to touch
it. Suffice it to say that the world does not appreciate such things.

>> If some featureless fungus, toxic to all other living things, engulfed the
>> globe, would that make it "superior"? Of course, not, it merely survived.
>
> I love when people contradict themselves in the same sentence -- makes
> my job much easier!

No, he did not contradict himself - he drew a distinction between
"superior" and "survived". You might argue that your definition of
"superior" *is* the ability to survive, but that's a matter for
logical argument, not for pointing and laughing.

> It is our destiny to use our intelligence to
> drive our own evolution at an ever accelerating rate. To NOT use that
> power would be to spit in the face of evolution itself!

Evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest, not by us using
our intelligence to influence it.

It's high time I stood up for who I am. I *do* spit in the face of
evolution. I do not believe that we came here because we evolved from
some lesser life-form, and I do not believe that the world is best
served by such philosophies.

God created us, roughly 6000-10000 years ago, and since then, many
things have happened (both good and bad), but never has there been the
emergence of any form of "next-species human". Look at history (just
recent history if you like - the last few hundred years) and find the
times when one group of people deemed themselves "more evolved" than
another group. Why were Negros treated as slaves in the US? Why were
Australian Aboriginals treated like animals? And the one I hinted at
above. If you truly believe that evolution is the way forward, then go
find some of the lobbyists for these groups, and say to their faces
that you believe that some humans are lesser than others.

If you come out of that alive, report back. Preferably with video. It
should be interesting.

ChrisA

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 13, 10:41 am, Tim Wintle <tim.win...@teamrubber.com> wrote:

> Imagine you go to a doctor and say "I've got the flu, can you give me
> antibiotics".
>
> In a Private healthcare system:
>
>  * The doctor gets paid for retaining a client.
>  * He is incentivised to do what you request.
> ... so he gives you the antibiotics.
>
> In a Public healthcare system:
>  * The doctor is paid no matter what.
>  * His job is to stop the population becoming ill.
>  * By reducing illnesses he reduces his workload, without reducing his
> wage
>
> ... so he'll only give you antibiotics if he feels you are at serious
> risk, and giving you antibiotics carries less risk for the population
> than the risk of the population getting immunities.

Of all the great arguments i have presented you choose the minor
"antibiotic comment" and run with it? But you take NO position on
"supporting the degenerates of society"? Would you mind making your
position known?

You see, you can have all the healthcare and healthcare dollars in the
world. But if your patient keeps eating greasy hamburgers, salty/oily
french fries, and blood-sugar spiking soda-pops, he is going to die a
nasty death! Sadly however, he will live for many years in a state of
poor heath before finally "kicking the bucket". All the while draining
the system of resources and money.

> [...]

> you can use that same argument for everything that taxes pay for - the
> only logical conclusion of that argument is anarchy (i.e. no taxes, and
> no government).
>
> If you are an anarchist then that's a different argument all together
> (not saying it doesn't have intellectual validity).

I am not an anarchist. Stop trying to label me.

> > Healthcare is expensive. Do you want a minimum wage doctor curing your
> > ills? And the frivolous lawsuits are not bringing the costs down
> > either.
>
> It's so expensive because of the marketing, and because of all the
> middle-men.

You're thinking of pharmaceuticals NOT healthcare. And while marketing
is a large expense for pharmaceutical companies; R&D, lawsuits, and
brown-nosing are the main cost of doing buisness.

> They also don't need to put up with people who aren't seriously ill - I
> don't know how long your private appointments are, but here in the UK a
> standard doctor's appointment is 5-10 minutes. If they decide you're
> actually ill they may extend that.

Five to ten minutes? Is the doctor an a-hole or a machine? Can a
doctor REALLY diagnose an illness in five to ten minutes? Are you
joking? And if not, do you ACTUALLY want the experience to be
synonymous with an assembly line? You don't fear misdiagnosis? I envy
your bravery!

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 14, 5:31 am, Duncan Booth <duncan.bo...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Duncan, your reading and comprehension skills are atrocious. Please re-
read the paragraph you quoted, then spend some time "comprehending"
it, then show me where i stated that "antibiotics cure viral
infections". psst: i NEVER said any such thing!

My point is: these "quacks" are prescribing antibiotics when people
don't even need them! Such disregard for immunity is frightening.
Penicillin was a gift from the gods, and we have squandered it! Thanks
free healthcare!

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 14, 6:44 pm, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you truly believe that only the best should be allowed to survive
> and that you are not of the best, then the logical thing to do is to
> immediately destroy yourself. Oddly enough, though, I don't see many
> eugenics proponents committing mass suicide for the benefit of the
> gene pool.

I don't need to destroy myself Chris. Likewise i don't need to destroy
anyone else. You are trying to cast me as an evil blood thirsty
person, and i can assure you, i am not.

All i need to do is NOT reproduce and i've done my part. Likewise all
WE need to do is keep the rest "of us" from reproducing.

I am not a degenerate, but my genes are flawed. All i can hope to do
is make an intellectual contribution to our evolution as a species.
Just because you're flawed in one area, does not mean you cannot make
contributions in other areas. You can still be part of the whole -- AS
LONG AS YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR PLACE!

> > There is nothing wrong with denying degenerates the right to
> > reproduce.
>
> Actually there is; I'm fairly sure that I wouldn't have been born if
> such policies had been in place, and I strongly suspect that you
> wouldn't have either.

So what's the problem with that?

> There was a country in the 20th century that
> adopted a lot of the sorts of policies you're talking about, and it's
> such a sensitive topic with MANY people that I'm not going to touch
> it. Suffice it to say that the world does not appreciate such things.

Of course people don't want to admit that they don't belong, or that
they are flawed, or that they are inferior. We are "wired" with egos
so that we don't purposely destroy ourselves; which is vital to our
"collective" evolution, but NOT our individual evolution.

However, like all software, the definitions don't always cover the
corner cases. Only WE, as intelligent beings, can compensate for the
missing code in our own software. Evolution is just a system. A very
dumb system. We are the only hope for evolution beyond what this base
system can create. We must take the reigns and drive our own
evolution.

> >> If some featureless fungus, toxic to all other living things, engulfed the
> >> globe, would that make it "superior"? Of course, not, it merely survived.
>
> > I love when people contradict themselves in the same sentence -- makes
> > my job much easier!
>
> No, he did not contradict himself - he drew a distinction between
> "superior" and "survived". You might argue that your definition of
> "superior" *is* the ability to survive, but that's a matter for
> logical argument, not for pointing and laughing.

"If" a fungus did in fact "engulf the earth", THEN it MUST be
superior!

> > It is our destiny to use our intelligence to
> > drive our own evolution at an ever accelerating rate. To NOT use that
> > power would be to spit in the face of evolution itself!
>
> Evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest, not by us using
> our intelligence to influence it.

But WE are the fittest! Because we are INTELLIGENT!

> God created us, roughly 6000-10000 years ago, and since then, many
> things have happened (both good and bad), but never has there been the
> emergence of any form of "next-species human". Look at history (just
> recent history if you like - the last few hundred years) and find the
> times when one group of people deemed themselves "more evolved" than
> another group. Why were Negros treated as slaves in the US?

Because they allowed themselves to be subjected. Sad, but true.

> Why were
> Australian Aboriginals treated like animals?

Because they allowed them selves to be subjected. Sad, but true.

> And the one I hinted at
> above.

Because the Jews allowed themselves to be subjected. Sad, but true.

Slaves only exist because they allow themselves to exist. When people
fight back against tyranny, tyranny fails. When people subject
themselves to tyranny, tyranny prospers. There have been many
instances in history where people did not allow themselves to be
subjected; William Wallace comes to mind.

"Freeeeeedoooooooommmmmmm!"
"Live free, or die!"
"From my cold dead hand!"
"Over my dead body!"
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be
demanded by the oppressed."
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
"Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."
"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will
not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11:48 AM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Duncan, your reading and comprehension skills are atrocious. Please re-
> read the paragraph you quoted, then spend some time "comprehending"
> it, then show me where i stated that "antibiotics cure viral
> infections". psst: i NEVER said any such thing!

I'm not sure how you'd go about creating a new strain of a virus
that's resistant to antibiotics, unless the previous strain was NOT
resistant. Viruses are _immune_ to antibiotics, and as we know from
Angband, immunity equals resistance times ten.

ChrisA

[John O'Hagan]

On Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:26:36 -0800 (PST)
Rick Johnson <rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 14, 6:44 pm, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> But WE are the fittest! Because we are INTELLIGENT!

And the whales say: But WE are the fittest! Because we are BIG!
And the rabbits say: But WE are the fittest! Because we are FERTILE!
And the snakes say: But WE are the fittest! Because we are VENOMOUS!

(Apologies to all animals mentioned for ascribing to them gratuitous
capitalisation and exclamation marks.)

Please read Darwin. He explicitly defined "fittest", in the context of
evolutionary science, to mean sufficiently well-adapted to immediate local
conditions to be able to reproduce. There is nothing generalisable about this.
Intelligence is only useful in human ecological niches; and if the world were
underwater you would gladly swap it for gills.

But I don't think you'll read Darwin, or any real science on the subject.
You'll cling to your popular-science cartoon version of evolution because you
need it to support your false, odious worldview, which finally emerges from the
swamp:

> > Why were Negros treated as slaves in the US?
>
> Because they allowed themselves to be subjected. Sad, but true.
>
> > Why were
> > Australian Aboriginals treated like animals?
>
> Because they allowed them selves to be subjected. Sad, but true.
>
> > And the one I hinted at
> > above.
>
> Because the Jews allowed themselves to be subjected. Sad, but true.

You have just demonstrated that you are the worst kind of racist. Not only have
you blamed the victim on a truly monstrous scale, you have assigned blame not to
individuals, but to entire "races". You are saying that something inherent in
each race caused them to "allow" their own subjugation.

Calling it "sad" does not get you off the hook. Your cover was always
thin but now it's blown.

[Duncan Booth]

Rick Johnson <rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 14, 5:31 am, Duncan Booth <duncan.bo...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > BS! With free healthcare, those who would have allowed their immune
>> > system fight off the flu, now take off from work, visit a local
>> > clinic, and get pumped full of antibiotics so they can create a new
>> > strain of antibiotic resistant flu virus! Thanks free healthcare!
>>
>> Anyone who can write 'antibiotic resistant flu virus' as though they
>> believe it really needs to read some elementary books about disease.
>>
>> Here's a clue: No flu viruses are treatable with antibiotics. In some
>> cas
> es
>> antibiotics may be useful for flu patients to treat secondary
>> bacterial infections, but they are not effective against viruses.
>
> Duncan, your reading and comprehension skills are atrocious. Please
> re- read the paragraph you quoted, then spend some time
> "comprehending" it, then show me where i stated that "antibiotics cure
> viral infections". psst: i NEVER said any such thing!

Rick, your reading and comprehension skills are atrocious. Please re-read

the paragraph you quoted, then spend some time "comprehending" it, then

show me where I stated that you '''stated that "antibiotics cure viral
infections"'''. I never said any such thing.

[Anssi Saari]

Matej Cepl <mc...@redhat.com> writes:

> Slightly less flameish answer to the question “What should I do,
> really?” is a tough one: all these suggested answers are bad because
> they don’t deal with the fact, that your input data are obviously
> broken. The rest is just pure GIGO …

Well, sure, but it happens that input data is broken and not fixable.
For example, I did a little program to display email headers like the
old frm that was bundled with elm, only with support for MIME decoding
of the headers. Obviously lots of email software is still completely
broken regarding MIME and also multi-line headers. However, something
useful can still be extracted from that broken data.

> BTW, can you display the following line?
>
> Příliš žluťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy.

Looks fine to me. You used an ellipsis too above. Well, I don't know
what it shold look like exactly. Lots of accents. Hmm, Google says it
means "The quick brown fox cried too lazy"? Seems appropriate :) BTW, I'm
sending this via Usenet, I wonder what happens in the mail-news gateway?

[Arnaud Delobelle]

On 15 February 2012 09:47, Duncan Booth <duncan...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> Rick Johnson <rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]

Perhaps it's a bit presumptuous of me but...

It's tempting to react to his inflammatory posts, but after all Rick
is a troll and experience shows that trolls are best left alone.
Also, please spare a thought for all of us who have him in our
killfiles.

--
Arnaud

[Duncan Booth]

Yes, sorry about that.

Actually, I thought it was a bit weird that I saw ChrisA's comment but not
the message he was commenting on until I went and looked for it. I read
this group on a couple of machines and it looks like Rick's killfile entry
had expired on the other but not this one. Next time I'm back on the other
machine I'll try to remember to sort out the killfile.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:04:34 +0000, Duncan Booth wrote:

> Actually, I thought it was a bit weird that I saw ChrisA's comment but
> not the message he was commenting on until I went and looked for it. I
> read this group on a couple of machines and it looks like Rick's
> killfile entry had expired on the other but not this one. Next time I'm
> back on the other machine I'll try to remember to sort out the killfile.

Yes, I have this problem too. I'm reluctant to killfile people forever,
call me a sucker if you like, but I'm willing to give people second
chances (and apparently third and fourth and fifth chances). Methinks
it's time for Monsieur Johnson to go back in the killfile.


--
Steven

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 15, 2:56 am, John O'Hagan <resea...@johnohagan.com> wrote:

> You have just demonstrated that you are the worst kind of racist. Not only have
> you blamed the victim on a truly monstrous scale, you have assigned blame not to
> individuals, but to entire "races".

Your tabloid sensationalism is the worst i've seen. You'll jump at any
chance to tag someone a racist, homophobic, sexist, or any other kind
of hate group you can muster in a weak attempt to win an argument you
cannot win by spewing ad hominem attacks.

You cannot stay on subject because your argument is baseless and mine
is the backed by truth. Just in case you have forgotten, here is the
main point: "degenerates are a drain on healthcare/society". Can you
counter that argument with a fact and prove they are not? The only
winning argument is that "degenerates pay their own medical bills"...
but as you and i know, most degenerates DON'T pay their own medical
bills. They expect US to pay them.

> You are saying that something inherent in
> each race caused them to "allow" their own subjugation.

I have PROVEN that when people FIGHT back, they will NOT be subjects
to tyranny; race has NOTHING to do with it. I gave one example in
history where people would rather die than be subjected to tyranny,
there are many more. "GIVE ME FREEDOM FOR GIVE ME DEATH!"

The world is full of evil people who seek to force their fellow man
into slavery. Those who refuse to fight for freedom will be victims,
on the other hand, those who are willing to sacrifice ALL in the name
of freedom will be free men.

300: "Go now! Run along and tell your Xerxes he faces free men here,
not slaves! Do it quickly, before we decide to make our wall just a
little bit bigger."

John, I have grown weary of educating you. Go back to your day job
writing op-eds for the National Inquirer and News of the World; they
love this vile sensationalist crap! Goodnight "John boy".

[Mark Lawrence]

The News of the Screws closed months ago.

As you didn't answer my question from some days back I'll ask it agin.

Please explain why previously healthy people get struck down with Common
Fatigue Syndrome amongst other things.

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 15, 9:18 am, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> As you didn't answer my question from some days back I'll ask it agin.
> Please explain why previously healthy people get struck down with Common
> Fatigue Syndrome amongst other things.

Why do you seek my counsel regarding medical ailments? Do you believe
i have special knowledge in the field? But more importantly: how is
your question germane to the "destruction of healthcare" and
"expansion of tyranny" by the degenerates of society; or by those who
support degeneracy by engaging in "degenerate eugenics"?

Was your question meant as rhetorical? Or merely yet ANOTHER crude
attempt to employ sophistry in hopes of coercing the less astute folks
among us to hop in your "clown car of delirium" and head-off down
ANOTHER path to that leads to logical fallacy?

Stay on subject!

[Mark Lawrence]

I don't seek your counsel on anything. You set the ball rolling and I
quote "If you can't afford healthcare, then you die." and "You want to
solve the healthcare problem then STOP TREATING PEOPLE WHO
DON'T HAVE INSURANCE!"

You later went on to say and I again quote
"Healthy people do not need healthcare very often, and in the rare
cases when they do, they don't bog down the system because their
bodies are strong. Why are their bodies strong? Because healthy people
eat correctly, healthy people exercise, therefore, healthy people have
correctly functioning immune systems -- of course quality genes always
help!"

The question was originally put in response to that, so you've resorted
to your usual tactics of spewing ad hominem attacks on anybody who dares
to challenge you in any way, shape or form.

If I were you I'd stick to things that you understand, like downloading
workable help files. But oh dear, you can't even manage that, you
simply moan like hell because the help file you had didn't work
correctly. Or IDLE is crap. Or ...

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[Ethan Furman]

Luckily for me there are enough folks that still reply to the trolls in
my killfile that I can see if it's time to take them off or not. ;)

(This one is a resounding NOT)

~Ethan~

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 8:04 AM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have PROVEN that when people FIGHT back, they will NOT be subjects
> to tyranny; race has NOTHING to do with it. I gave one example in
> history where people would rather die than be subjected to tyranny,
> there are many more. "GIVE ME FREEDOM FOR GIVE ME DEATH!"
>
> The world is full of evil people who seek to force their fellow man
> into slavery. Those who refuse to fight for freedom will be victims,
> on the other hand, those who are willing to sacrifice ALL in the name
> of freedom will be free men.
>
> 300: "Go now! Run along and tell your Xerxes he faces free men here,
> not slaves! Do it quickly, before we decide to make our wall just a
> little bit bigger."

If you get all your history from Hollywood, then no wonder you are so
badly misinformed. Braveheart and 300 are inspiring movies to be
sure, but they are also highly fictionalized. In the real world, the
execution of William Wallace actually succeeded in quelling the
Scottish rebellion for a time -- when Robert the Bruce started it up
again half a year later, his motives were entirely political in nature
(he had murdered a rival in a church and been excommunicated; his
options were to place himself on the throne or become a fugitive), not
out of some noble sense of guilt or duty to Wallace or desire for
freedom as depicted in the film.

Your statement that the Africans brought to America allowed themselves
to be enslaved is simply false. There were dozens of slave rebellions
in the United States prior to the Civil War. Most of them failed and
ended in the executions of the rebels. You won't see Hollywood making
too many movies about those, which is probably why you don't know
anything about them.

[Prasad, Ramit]

>> They also don't need to put up with people who aren't seriously ill - I
>> don't know how long your private appointments are, but here in the UK a
>> standard doctor's appointment is 5-10 minutes. If they decide you're
>> actually ill they may extend that.

>Five to ten minutes? Is the doctor an a-hole or a machine? Can a
>doctor REALLY diagnose an illness in five to ten minutes? Are you
>joking? And if not, do you ACTUALLY want the experience to be
>synonymous with an assembly line? You don't fear misdiagnosis? I envy
>your bravery!

Actually, I find that (5-10 minutes of doctor time) completely true even in
America. The difference is that I spend 30-60minutes waiting to be called,
then another 5min with a nurse for pre-doctor stuff (blood pressure,
why I am there, etc), finally another 5 minutes with the nurse for
any necessary post-doctor work (drawing blood, shots, etc.). My total
doctor talking time is really 5-10 minutes. Of course, if I was sick in an unusual
way then the doctor would see me for longer, but the average doctor
tends to see the same couple dozen things over and over.

This is true for every doctor I can remember, but YMMV.

Ramit


Ramit Prasad | JPMorgan Chase Investment Bank | Currencies Technology
712 Main Street | Houston, TX 77002
work phone: 713 - 216 - 5423

--

This email is confidential and subject to important disclaimers and
conditions including on offers for the purchase or sale of
securities, accuracy and completeness of information, viruses,
confidentiality, legal privilege, and legal entity disclaimers,
available at http://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/disclosures/email.

[Rick Johnson]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:23 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 2:01 PM, Rick Johnson
> I make a middle-class income and do not feel that I am anywhere near
> being "enslaved" by my income taxes, which amount to less than 10% of
> my gross income after deductions and credits.

Ten percent?!?! You pay less income tax by percentage than most rich
folks, including Mitt Romney! I envy you since you must be one of the
lucky folks who ONLY pay income tax. I guess you never purchase
ANYTHING or live under the tyranny of local jurisdictions ON TOP of
the federal jurisdiction?

Here is a list of taxes most everyone else will encounter:

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
Capital Gains Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Court Fines (indirect taxes)
Deficit spending
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel permit tax
Gasoline Tax
Gift Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inflation
Inheritance Tax Interest expense (tax on the money)
Inventory tax IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Local Income Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Septic Permit Tax
Service Charge Taxes
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Taxes (Truckers)
Sales Taxes
Recreational Vehicle Tax
Road Toll Booth Taxes
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone federal excise tax
Telephone federal universal service fee tax
Telephone federal, state and local surcharge taxes
Telephone minimum usage surcharge tax
Telephone recurring and non-recurring charges tax
Telephone state and local tax
Telephone usage charge tax
Toll Bridge Taxes
Toll Tunnel Taxes
Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)
Trailer Registration Tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

... and don't forget for declare those pennys on your eyes!


> Heck, there are poorer
> people than I who voluntarily donate that much to religious
> organizations on top of their taxes.

Again, lucky you! MOST middle class people pay 30-50% of their income
in taxes!

> Say what you want about the income tax system, but at least net income
> still basically increases monotonically.  If you make more gross than
> me, chances are that you're going to make more net than me as well.

So you support a flat tax system? A system where everybody pays the
same percentage?

Actually i think 10% income tax is a fair amount although i believe
taxing income silly. If the government cannot provide national
security, domestic security, and LIMITED infratructure on 10% of what
we make, they are wasting too much of OUR money.

> > HOWEVER, healthcare is not a concern of the greater society, but only
> > the individual -- with the exception of contagious disease of course,

> > which effects us all!
>
> I disagree, and here's why.  Let's say I'm a billionaire, and I'm
> diagnosed with cancer.  Do you think I can just round up a bunch of
> scientists and tell them "Here's a billion dollars.  Now go find a
> cure my cancer"?  Of course not, it doesn't work that way.  If the
> necessary research hasn't already been done, then it's unlikely that
> it will be finished in the few years or months that I have before the
> cancer kills me, no matter how much of my own money I throw at it.

I agree that keeping R&D "alive" is very important for our collective
advancement. I do not fear technology like some people. Futhermore, i
don't have any problem funding R&D for ANY of the sciences, beit
medical or otherwise. But let me assure you, under a private
healthcare system (psst: the kind where people pay they own way!)
there will ALWAYS be enough people to keep R&D alive. Besides, the
degenerates are only seeking care for self induced heath issues.

> Real medical research is primarily driven by medical treatment.

Yes, but that does not mean we should hand degenerates a meal ticket.

> -- if I
> as a wealthy private investor am going to invest in such a highly
> speculative and risky venture as drug research, I will be more willing
> to invest a large sum of money if the potential recipients (i.e.
> consumers) number in the hundreds of thousands, not just the few
> thousand who will be able to pay for the drug out of pocket.
> Likewise, much of the money the drug companies make off of sales goes
> back into research so that they can be ready with a newer, better drug
> by the time their patents expire.
>
> Distributing health care coverage expands the market for treatments
> and so allows the state of the art to advance faster.  Yes, with
> socialized health care, some of our tax money goes into that pool, and
> a lot of that tax money just ends up as profits in the hands of
> wealthy shareholders.  The other side of that coin, though, is that if
> we ever find ourselves in the position that we need those treatments
> ourselves, the medical state of the art will be that much better for
> it.

And if you can afford the care great, if not, you'd better buy an
insurance policy.

You know, people love to whine about how privatized healthcare is so
unfair to the degenerates. What about the doctors? Would you expect a
doctor to work for free? Remeber, doctors spend a decade or more in
college and rack up HUGE debts to pay for their education. You don't
mind stealing from taxpayers to fund degenerates, but it's the same as
stealing from doctors. Observe:

Doctor: "Okay, your diease is cured. You have a clean bill of heath!
Your bill is $500,000"
Patient: "Thanks doc, but it seems i am little light. Can i just pay
you $20.00 and we call it even?"
Doctor: "What? I just saved your life. I spent the last three months
caring for you. Using expensive medical equipment and years of
laboratory research. Do you know how many lab rats and monkeys died a
horrible death so that you can live? How can I do all that for
$20.00?"

Of course you would not, because you'd have to look the doctor in the
eye whilst robbing him. On the other hand, with tax payer subsidized
healthcare (AKA: Public Heathcare), you don't have to look anyone in
the eye. The victim of your plunder is just some random taxpayer
footing your bills!

People, THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH! Every product that is made and every
service rendered was a result of someone's hard labor. Sleep on that
you degenerates!

Hypocrisy! It's no different than the idiots who whine for the fair
treatment of fluffy mammals but them declare chemical warfare on
insects and reptiles. To them ONLY fluffy mammals deserve fair
treatment because they are so cuddly (and cute BTW) PUKE!.

But you want to know the REAL reason? It's because mammals return love
and reptiles and insects don't. It's because people are selfish. If
another being will no reciprocate their love, then they murder that
being with extreme prejudice, and not feel one bit guilty about it! Do
you understand how backward you are? Do you understand how selfish and
immoral you are? Do you understand how incredibly dense you are?
Because of people like YOU, we don't deserve the right to evolve!

> But beyond that, I also think that we as a society have an ethical
> commitment to help one another out when we find ourselves in trouble,
> because that's what a civilized society is.

I agree totally. Let say an innocent is shot in the course of a
robbery. I would not mind my tax dollars going towards the victims
medical care IF he could not afford the care himself. Even if he was a
degenerate.

On the other hand, if some lame-brain decided to climb MT. Everest and
got stuck on top with frost-bite... TOO BAD! Same goes for dummies who
develop lung caner from somking... TOO BAD! Or cirrhosis of the liver
from one too many "adult beverages"... TOO BAD! Or diabetes from
eating too many candy bars and/or drinking too many sodas... TOO BAD,
TOO BAD, TOO BAD!!!

I am tired of the whines and laments of vermin, almost as much as i am
tired of the silence of the moral majority! It's time to put
degenerates in their place!

[Rick Johnson]

On Feb 13, 7:37 pm, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Rick Johnson
>
> <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > # Py>=3.0
> > py> sum(earner.get_income(2012) for earner in earners2012) /
> > len(earners2012)
> > average_income
>
> > Once you exceed that amount you are robbing your fellow man. How can
> > you justify making more than your fair share UNLESS someone offers
> > their work load to YOU? You can't. You are living in excess. And for
> > those who think the average_income is too small, well then, it's time
> > to implement population control!
>
> My equation looks something like this:
>
> # Brain >= 0,1
> brain> Your contribution to society / Society's contribution to you
>
> This value should be able to exceed 1.0 across the board. In fact, if
> it doesn't, then as a society we're moving backward.

Are we talking about money or deeds? If deeds then i agree, if money
then i disagree.

A society is NOT made better by contributing money. Who does the money
go to? History has shown that money ends up being wasted, that money
ends up being squandered, and that money ends up empowering tyranny!

However

A society IS improved when good deeds and good wills are injected by
the individual. We should ALWAYS invest more good deeds and expect
less. So in this case we should ALWAYS exceed 1.0.

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Rick Johnson
<rantingri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is a list of taxes most everyone else will encounter:

You forgot the Microsoft Tax and the Stupid Tax.

ChrisA