This one has been linked to death, but I've only just gotten through to the server. This guy teaches "Divinity and Theobiology at Fellowship University", which appears not to have a website.

ADDENDUM III (4/20/2002): Another reader (it has been busy today!) has informed me of another link between Apple and the forces of darkness that my initial research missed. Apparently the Darwin OS is not the original creation of Apple Computers but is instead based off of an older, obsolete OS called "BSD Unix". The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork (pictured above). This OS -- and its Darwin offspring -- extensively use what are called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these "daemons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.

ADDENDUM IV (4/21/2002): Apparently anti-Christian zealots -- as well as shocked Christians who have unwittingly become Mac owners -- are linking to this article, which explains the large number of emails we have received on this topic. More clues have come in showing the dark nature of Apple Computers. According to one of our readers, the new MacOS X contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666". What other horrors lurk in this thing?

  

Scoble has a great retort to Dave's take on Gates's testimony the Microsoft trial:

Which monopoly would I rather deal with? Bill Gates or Steve Case's? I can answer that one easily: I fired Steve Case from my computer seven years ago and I ain't planning on letting him back on any time soon.

  

Geez, get a link from Dave and you start noticing all of the things that are wrong with your site! My Zope category used a theme that displayed navigation links horizontally. That's fine, but I have several dozen of them, so it wrapped and made the column too wide. OK, change theme. That theme doesn't have the item title in its #itemTemplate.txt file. OK, make that fix. Repost something there so we'll get a quick rebuild. Oh, and I don't have links to my categories on the nav bar. OK, let's add those to #navigatorLinks.xml.

I also don't have a robots.txt file, so I look bad to the crawlers. Put one in the www folder. Great. Check to make sure it's there. It's there alright. Unfortunately, it's had its name changed to "robots.html". Oh yeah, I rememeber that Radio does that. How do I fix it? Don't know. touch robots.txt. That fixed that problem!  

In the comments, Thomas Lockney reports that Perl does the same thing. And Bravada Zadada (what a name!) suggests that this behavior is no surprise:

When you are working with tuples, the trailing comma is required when the tuple has only one element.

    members = ( 'dave', ) # tuple with one element 
    members = ( 'dave' ) # a string

It's no surprise that the trailing comma is allowed in all situations

I agree. It's no surprise -- at some level. I've known about the single-item tuple rule for years, but I never made the connection before. I assumed that the trailing comma was a special case. Well, we all know what happens when you assume!

This assumption has cost me literally thousands of extra keystrokes over my time working with Python. What you don't know can hurt you!

I shudder to think of the number of times in my programming life that I've written code to drop the trailing comma on a list so it would be interpreted correctly.

Update: I just checked, and the same is true with dictionaries in Python. A trailing comma is ignored.  

I just noticed this nice thing about Python. When you're working with a list, you'll often split each item onto a different line, like this:

members = [
            'dave',
            'howard'
          ]

In this case, it's easy enough to add a new item to the list by copying and pasting a line, then changing the value. Many languages work this way, but the problem comes with the last item. That one can't have a comma after, it, so if you want to add a new item at the end, you need to do a bunch more work.

But not with Python. Python ignores trailing commas in lists or tuples, so

members = [
            'dave',
            'howard',
          ]

is perfectly valid. Thanks "Guido"!

And thanks Dave!  

Listening to the new Elvis Costello record, When I Was Cruel. The sticker on the wrapper proclaims: "First LOUD album since 199?." It feels more like Spike than Painted From Memory. I'm two listens in, running it in the background while I work, but so far I like what I hear.

And I'm looking forward to seeing him live next month.

Check out the suggested retail price on the new disc: Nineteen bucks! I remember when CDs first came out and hearing that their cost was something around $5 per disc. And later when it was around $2. And now it's around $1. Those numbers seemed very theoretical. No longer. I can easily buy 100 blanks for $30 or get 1,000 discs duped for $1,590.

And they wonder why sales are declining....   

Larry Miller: Whosoever Blesses Them:

The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no "Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation." So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs From The Same General Area Who Are In Deep Denial About Never Being Able To Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death." I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters."

Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel. They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course--that's where the real fun is--but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel--or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it--for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth, you know that's really saying something. It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

via LGF