Not trying to detract from your points which are still valid, but Python is, in fact, 32 years old from first public release.

If you just want to count from big early releases with popularity spikes (ie, when we got something useful to a lot more people), 1.5 is 25 and 2.0 is 23. 1.5.x was when I first started using it.

It's definitely nothing to do with traffic engineering and/or efficient peering with CDNs and content providers. It's not like most large CDNs combine DNS and BGP to load balance requests and localise traffic to the most efficient paths.

It could never be less efficient CDN utilisation forcing use of orders-of-magnitude more expensive paid transit rather than local peering arrangements, or even forcing the big boys to push exponentially growing traffic levels long distance rather than servicing it locally.

Yes, they are. Some are also used for sheep. Our dry climate and adapted ecosystems require a lot of space to support livestock, so there's a lot of massive pastoral leases on marginal land that nobody could find any other use for in the 1800s.

For example: Australian livestock stations over 4000 sq km in size

The largest station (or "ranch") in the USA misses this list by nearly 1000 sq km. If the largest were its own country, Anna Creek, it'd be around 147 out of nearly 200 countries ranked by land area, beating out about a quarter of countries in the world.

I agree it's more the monopolies that bring things down. Government run departments and organisations are as prone as big monolithic corporations to seizing up and resisting change. Everything's great when they're new and fresh, the hard part is keeping the mindset and attitudes that way in the long term.

I'm in Australia, and I remember very well how bad broadband was under Telecom and Telstra. Even our dial-up internet was pretty poor, which is all we really had back then - the rest of the world was already rolling out cable and DSL. Telstra, as a largely government-owned "privatised" telco had no incentive to innovate, increase service levels or offer new products, were first forced to wholesale their retail access products to competitors and as the competition matured, forced to offer access to their physical plant (eg, copper pairs, exchange space, tower space) on a reasonable costing model. We had a huge, vibrant ecosystem of access providers offering fibre, wireless, DSL, etc up until ~2008, when everyone stopped investing and started waiting for the NBN to appear.

Now we have this NBN, which was designed completely contrary to the way it was marketed from the beginning (protecting the largest incumbent telcos' and NBN lead contractors' primary revenue streams) and has been built as a monolithic system with no competitive access to physical plant. Services that the NBN can't deliver aren't possible, successive governments have made the design worse (eg, the "MTM") and legislation prevents access providers from building competing retail networks over holes in coverage. To make it worse, the build-out contractors seem to be paid based on premises on-network rather than successfully connected, so up until late 2017 they've just been smashing out abysmal builds as quickly as possible and going back months later to fix the problems - the repair teams are a fraction of the size of the build teams, and repairing already requires more effort than doing it properly the first time.

This long rant (believe me, I've got a lot more and could go for a while) is just an example of a government network infrastructure project gone poorly. Contractors and design partners were chosen from existing large network operators and had a vested interest in not killing their biggest cash cows. Technology was chosen that would least impact their services and allow them to manoeuvre for competitive advantage down the track. Later governments took the remaining good parts of the design and returned it to the old Telstra model of using whatever can be scraped up, but this time we don't have competitors able to deploy their own equipment to underserviced areas or to supply missing features.

These successful municipal American ISPs have the right mindset (they've been created to fix problems and service customers) and are hopefully small enough to keep it. It doesn't really matter that they're associated with government.

You haven't heard the Brits' opinion of our summers.

My self-defense raptor is sitting on my copy of Padlocks Monthly.

Sorry - quick update - Wedgetails are protected, but it's a particular subspecies in Tassie which only has ~200 pairs left. Misread the wikipedia article.

If a drone operator accidentally injured or killed a wedgie, there is potential jail time involved. They're heavily protected, with only about 200 pairs left.

"They attacked my $80k flying camera" wouldn't be a good excuse, they're a known threat to drone operators and it would be negligent to allow the drone to injure them. Shooting/zapping at, reinforcing the drone to the point where it poses a danger to the eagle or switching from a fixed-wing to a multirotor drone without adequate protection - for the eagle - wouldn't go down too well in a courtroom.

My favourite manager (now retired) had the same philosophy. You'll find a similar theme amongst most people's favourite bosses.

He was an ex-Army (AU) warrant officer and wouldn't hesitate to rip you up like a drill sergeant if it was your fault, but equally wouldn't hesitate to throw it back upstairs if it were a problem with senior management or sales. If any customers were being unreasonable with his engineers, he'd practically teleport to site, sit everyone down, look the customer in the eye and calmly ask them what their business case was for being difficult with a vendor.

He also had a mostly hands-off PM style, he'd just bump into people during breaks at random points, ask a couple of questions, move on. Ask him where the pieces of project were at and he could list them off like a human Gantt chart just based on those queries. But woe betide you if you didn't inform him of any looming problems before they became serious, or if you tried to push blame away. If you came to him with a blunt statement along the lines of "I fucked up, here's the issue, I think this could solve it", he'd bend over backwards to get it sorted.

I've since tried to model my own management style after his - definitely not as successfully.

We just call all our spacemates "Bruce".

Ground crew are all named "Dave". Davo if you want to be less formal.

We won't be taking American tourists into space for a while - so no need to worry about giant Fosters-branded litter.

The vast majority of companies in the world, even the developed world, are small enterprises who don't warrant a single IT guy, let alone 3+ to ensure no single person can wander off with the keys to the kingdom. Unless you have a truly poorly-maintained system or utterly helpless desktop users, organisations under 50 seats generally want to outsource to a trusted partner. These will scale from one-man bands with a few sites under their belts up to large multinational IT providers, depending on requirements. Beyond that (rough) point, organisations will start to move chunks of IT responsibility in-house.

Even with 3+ support staff, usually there's going to be someone who's "more senior" (especially if they've been there 14 years) with not only greater levels of knowledge and access, but a much deeper level of trust from the rest of the team and other parts of the business.

At some point, you have to trust the people who work for you. Perfectly foreseeable that this would happen if the business focus isn't on securing and silo'ing data from their own staff. If it was, they would have business justification for a larger team and much more oversight from management, even a budget for external audits.

No sane organisation without such requirements is going to drop 100k+ per FTE on people who spend an idle 70% of work hours just checking each other's actions in case one of them quit. They're very likely to quit from boredom and working conditions, too.

Do not stare at Internet with remaining eye?

Even if it had all the features, from TFA, the guy pointed it at a group of people standing still and dumped it.

The car would've assumed the driver knew what he was doing (it only works when moving slowly and not accelerating hard) and plowed into the fools anyway.

Just to clarify, I was a TPG customer for >14 years, from back when they were a no-frills technically oriented dial up ISP operating off the back of an older corporate IP/X.25 WAN provider. Most of that time I was on an unlimited plan of some description. When they decided to drop any focus on quality and push for pure price competition is when they started going downhill - early '00s.

I remember when Mr Teoh used to switch to international transit whenever he was negotiating with Telstra for better domestic transit pricing. Anything to the gang of 4 would go all the way to San Jose then back home again. Having to manually choose a proxy in order to browse during peak because the transparent load balancer was a bit iffy. More recently, every time they go on an advertising spree the network goes down the toilet again. It's far worse down in Sydney or Melbourne I hear.

6 months of jitter and packet loss on my home DSL prompted the move and I couldn't believe I'd waited that long. There was nothing wrong with the tail, it was all on the TPG network edge - multiple refreshes to get a page to load, packet loss, serious jitter to anything outside their network. SPT and TPG resources were fine and it was only during peak - I was monitoring 24/7 with SLA probes. Internode is more expensive but rock solid - I've only been with the 'node for 3 years, the difference is night and day.

I work in the telco space, several of my employers' upstream providers are now owned by TPG. They're nearly as bad in wholesale/corporate as residential. There's been some improvement but they're consuming companies rather than absorbing their strengths, where those strengths cost a little extra. That was the point I was trying to make.