It's an interesting 5th Amendment argument that your dreams would be giving testimony against yourself. Our technology is SO far beyond what the Founding Fathers could ever dream of that we're in uncharted waters.
Um, our science fiction might be. Our technology is nowhere close to making it possible to get any detailed information at all out of your dreams. (The robot described in this article merely looks at brain activity and "creatively" translates that into "the kinds of things people do in dreams". It's totally non-specific, and its accuracy is really rather questionable as well.)
It would be interesting to hear your non recursive definition of a 'dictator', as I wonder how many other leaders may fall into this category.
My non-recursive definition of a "dictator" is a leader who uses oppressive means to hold onto power, where "oppressive means" are things like stifling free political speech, rigging (or simply not holding) elections, and intimidating or imprisoning peaceful political opponents.
The leaders of China stifle free speech, do not hold elections, and imprison political opponents: therefore they are dictators. The same goes for the leaders of countries like Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, arguably Pakistan, etc.
On the other hand, the leaders of countries like the USA, Canada, Britain, France, etc. encourage free political speech, hold elections that the majority even of their opponents believe are free and fair, and do not intimidate or imprison peaceful dissidents; therefore they are not dictators, by my definition.
Seems fairly clear and consistent to me, but I'm sure you'll find something to nitpick.
If you call it Fedora or Ubuntu you create a distinction between the two. Most average users would attribute such a distinction to mean complete system incompatibility.
What, like they assume XP and Vista are completely incompatible?
Look, people cope with different Windows systems behaving very differently every day. Different Linux distros are more different from one another, but not by all that much. The solution is education, not dumbing down.
That hinders adoption because you cant say "Ok in Linux to change setting A, click Start->Control Panel->widget.
But you can't say "in Windows..." either, because it keeps changing between versions. (You can't even say "in Windows Vista..." or "in Windows XP...", because you don't know which mode the user's control panel is set to display in.)
The real problem is that people are much more forgiving towards Windows. When they can't get something working in Windows, they shrug resignedly and assume that God never meant it to happen. When they can't get something working in Linux, they assume Linux is crap and go back to Windows. And the only way we'll ever escape that is if we stop trying to sell Linux as a free or cheap replacement for Windows, because that makes people automatically assume it's going to be worse.
It works acceptably on Windows. It most certainly does not work quite fine on Macs, though. The OS X port is a very buggy work in progress; it's bad enough that the GTK+ website doesn't even suggest using it, preferring instead to provide would-be OS X users with a terse "coming soon" page.
(Yeah, there's an X11 version, but X11 on OS X is a horribly clunky second-class citizen that most Mac users have never even heard of, let alone have installed, and would refuse to use if they saw it. That does not count as "works quite fine".)
BitTorrent is critical for the success of Open Source and Free Software projects, in that it is used to distribute installation CD images. Distribution by HTTP alone is often prohibitively costly.
It's also important for musicians like myself, as well as to the musicians that are members of Jamendo, which distributes Creative Commons-licensed music via BitTorrent and eMule.
In that case you should be among the most vociferous opponents of The Pirate Bay, a website which is dedicated to promoting the use of BitTorrent for piracy and which takes pride in publicly refusing to take any steps whatsoever to protect any artist's rights.
It is this kind of wilfully irresponsible behaviour which is primarily responsible for the popular belief that BitTorrent itself is somehow inherently illegal. And it's long past time that legal users got together and stood up against the pirates, who are so determined to carry on infringing copyright that they may well drag all legal BitTorrent users down with them.
Any person shall be at liberty to publish his ideas in print, in writing, and in speech, subject to his being held responsible in a court of law.
How exactly does this measure go against that? It's not stopping anyone publishing their ideas in print, writing, or speech. It may possibly be stopping a tiny minority of people doing so via a single very specific website, but they can easily just go to another website and publish them there without any fear of censorship.
Plus, note that it says his ideas. Not other people's ideas. So 99.999999999% of content downloaded using TPB trackers is not covered by that clause anyway.
the decision will become completely invalid and worthless in the space of 20 minutes, and for very little cost (basically - however long it takes for the average Joe Dane to find and learn how to use TOR).
Hardly. The average Joe Dane is going to switch to a different tracker site, or a different P2P system. Even if they manage somehow get TOR working (e.g. by finding one of the simple-to-use repackaged versions) they're unlikely to find it particularly usable -- it crawls. Seriously, I just tried using it to do a web search, and it took about five minutes, compared to five seconds without TOR. That is a technology that might appeal to a dissident in fear of his life, but your average low-attention-span teenaged pirate is hardly going to put up with a sixty-fold slowdown!
Forget the fact that rights are being trampled for a minute
Yes, they are, but at least this ruling will reduce that for a little while until the pirates find another way to trample on the rights of the authors and musicians whose hard work they are appropriating.
Oh, wait, did you mean the pirates' rights? Do please elaborate; I don't recall seeing a "right to download other people's IP for free" in any laws recently.
Sorry, but there is no defense in this case. Blocking BitTorrent per se would be trampling on people's rights, because BitTorrent is a neutral technology that is used for many legitimate purposes. But The Pirate Bay is not like that. There's a hint in the name, see? The Pirate Bay is openly and unashamedly dedicated to supporting and promoting illegal activity. Pirate Bay apologists are constantly telling us that the website itself is legal, and it's only the people who use it who are violating copyright law. Well, if that's the case, what exactly is wrong with stopping people from using it to violate copyright law?
The depressing thing is, as a man I can't really think of why we should be allowed to stick around.
Come to that, why should people with disabilities be allowed to stick around, when a fully able-bodied society would be perfectly viable? Why should people with dark skin be allowed to stick around, when a fully-white society would be perfectly viable? Why should Jews be allowed to stick around, when a fully Jew-free society would be perfectly viable?
Most people view such questions as shocking, revolting, taboo. We have collectively decided that such questions simply have no place in our lives. We do not need any explanations or justifications: the idea that all these groups have a fundamental and irrevocable right to exist is taken as axiomatic. It's one of the foundations of our modern western civilisation, period, and there is simply no further room for debate.
The question of whether men should be "allowed" to exist is the same question, asked in a different way. Therefore the answer, to people in our society, will be the same: of course men must be allowed to exist. No justification will be required.
(Not to invoke Godwin or anything, but there's a reason some people refer to extremist feminists as "feminazis". Their views are unlikely to become mainstream any time soon.)
That's when you're WRITING code. You are interacting with vim on a line-by-line basis. Each time it fails to guess what you intended, you immediately (and probably subliminally) correct it.
The point remains that Python cannot be indented automatically. For example, consider the trivial example of
def f(i): if i > 2: i = 10 i = i + 1 return i
There are three valid ways this could be indented, with the possible values of f(1) being None, 1, and 2. It is impossible for a computer to guess which is intended. Therefore, it is impossible in general to auto-indent Python code, QED.
"It's not a problem for me" is not a viable answer to "this is a problem for many people". Some people don't find Perl too hard to read, but that doesn't mean Perl isn't often hard to read. Some people don't find Ruby too slow, but that doesn't mean Ruby isn't often slow. And you don't find Python's significant whitespace a problem, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make life more difficult for the writers of IDEs and automatic code transformation tools.
Observe that the best-known other programming language with significant whitespace, Haskell, provides an alternative brace-and-semicolons syntax as an option for cases where whitespace is not the most readable choice. Python has already been heavily influenced by Haskell (that's where the idea for list comprehensions came from, for example); it's a shame that political and religious issues mean it's unlikely ever to copy this other very practical idea.
Except that it's a very unlikely thing to say sarcastically. The normal sarcastic approach would be to pretend that you care very much about the thing you don't care about, not to pretend you care about it a tiny bit.
Given which, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the "could care less" form comes from a mishearing or misunderstanding of the original "couldn't care less", not from a conscious attempt to be sarcastic. The "sarcasm" explanation is, I suspect, a retrospective attempt to rationalise the usage, based on an assumption that it would be somehow bad to use the idiom if it was illogical.
But the usage isn't bad just because it's illogical, any more than it's bad to say silly things like "it's raining cats and dogs", and nor is it inferior because it began as a mistake, any more than it's inferior to refer to one of those little green things as a "pea" rather than the older "pease". Language changes, and usually not in any logical way. None of this matters, because people don't analyse it as a set of individual words: they just recognise the complete idiom and understand its meaning without any interpretation of the words themselves. In fact, I bet most people don't even notice the difference between the two -- only those who have sensitized themselves to it by convincing themselves that it somehow matters which you use.
In those cases I prefer the use of shell scripts since these are easily transportable.
Excuse me while I roll around on the floor laughing.
I ran into a fun problem with a shell script recently. Turned out that it relied on the setting of an environment variable that the "programmer" had in ~/.profile. Not documented, of course. It was hell to debug.
At least when Perl is missing a CPAN module it tells you exactly which module it's missing and refuses even to start the script, instead of getting halfway through what it's doing and then suddenly bailing out with an irrelevant message that doesn't even tell you where in the script the error occurred.
True. And a personal computer needs user permissions.. why?
Because many "personal" computers are shared between multiple users in a family, and it's hardly a brilliant idea to make it easy for child A to delete child B's homework.
You're right, although you should ignore the last Bond movie to complete your analogy -- a nice, gritty, back to the roots type reboot of the series. Whereas Windows seems to be showing quite the opposite development with Vista.
Well... possibly. Casino Royale was sloppily edited and ended up dragging on for far too long. I'm sure there's a Vista analogy in there if you stretch it far enough.
Java can be optimized at runtime, so the JVM can watch the running code, see what gets executed most often, and optimize the _running_ code for that situation. C/C++ can only optimize at compile time according to what it _thinks_ will be executed most often. Sometimes one it better than the other, but profiled runtime optimization on a long-running server process is one of the situations where Java can perform better than statically compiled code.
Indeed. Though it's surprisingly hard to find rigorous studies comparing the two, so it's hard to say how far the theoretical benefits of runtime optimisation affect performance in practice. (Bear in mind that it has to catch up with the static code before it can overtake!)
Also, things are complicated further by the ability to apply restricted versions of the same principle to statically compiled code. For example, you can profile a C/C++ program running with real data and then recompile using the generated profile to guide optimisation. I don't think I've seen any comparisons of that to runtime optimisations at all.
So it's hard to say whether Java really has any performance advantage or disadvantage overall. Better IMO to focus on the less disputable benefits, like Java's immunity to segfaults and buffer overflows, and that nice compile-once-run-anywhere setup.
Where Java falls flat is in end-user software, where responsiveness per GHz is the primary metric. That and embedded systems where responsiveness per MHz is the primary metric.:-D Oh, and responsiveness per watt....
And yet, for some reason, if you put all the three together - demanding consumers, low-spec hardware, and strict power consumption concerns - you get the cellphone, where Java is surprisingly popular! Funny old world, isn't it?
I apologize for the apples and oranges of this comparison, it was the first one I could come up with off the top of my head where I never imagined Python would be better, but I think overall it's a bit clearer whats going on and why.
That's because, to put it bluntly, the Perl version sucks.:) It probably is representative of a lot of really bad Perl code out there, but I bet if Python was anything like as widespread as Perl then there'd be plenty of Python out there that would make Guido gouge his own eyes out.
Specific problems: why aren't you using strict? Why all the parens? Why are you using an eager "for" rather than a lazy "while" to scan a file? Why are you starting the regex with a pointless.*? Why are you cramming everything into one line that's far too long? Why are you using printf without a format string? About the only good thing you're doing is assigning the lines to a variable instead of using $_.
The bare minimum to pass code review at any competent Perl shop would be something like
while (my $line = <STDIN>) {
my ($num_users, $load_now, $load_five, $load_fifteen) =
$line =~ m/(\d+) users, load averages: ([\d.]+) ([\d.]+) ([\d.]+)/;
if (defined $num_users) {
print "$num_users users are logged in\n";
} }
and many would demand you split out the regex into a qr//, similar to what you did in the Python version, at which point you would also want to use the/x modifier and add some comments to document what each group captures (or use named captures, if 5.10 is available).
Yeah, badly written Perl is arguably less readable than badly-written any-other-major-language, but anyone who starts any project in any language without adequate coding standards is asking for trouble. And Perl has some fairly good coding standards enforcement these days in the form of Perl::Critic.
Incidentally, a question for you: if you're a Python advocate, why the heck aren't you using named captures? They make regex matching vastly more readable and less fragile, and I believe Python has actually had them for longer than Perl has!
(Not a Perl fan or a Python fan, by the way; I tolerate Perl for some things where it's the only language available to me, but give me a nice static type system any day.)
Nice strawman. Back in reality, however, nobody was complaining about anyone celebrating cultural difference. (Nobody was even complaining about constructive criticism of problems with other cultures!) So your post was completely irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Now, would you care to actually address the point made in the post you were replying to? Are you going to stand up in public, preferably not posting anonymously, and explain why you believe it is not racist to throw around unsupported accusations that the Japanese people are obsessed with showing tentacle-rape pornography to minors?
I'm sure many of us would be interested to read a reasoned argument on the subject. There may well be a case to be made here. But logical fallacies don't strengthen it.
Apple users should go for the Guardian's mixture of smugness, cult like atmosphere and complete indifference to reality.
Ha! You may insult him now, but you'll be singing a different tune when he finishes defeating Lord British and laying waste to Britannia, and finally has time to turn his attention to the Avatar's homeworld.
Honestly, I don't care about any computers that I don't use.
"Use" or "operate"? You almost certainly use quite a lot of computers you don't operate. Slashdot, for example: you were using the Slashdot server when you posted that comment button, but how much control do you have over the security practices of the people who operate it?
Maybe the worst thing that could happen if your Slashdot account details were compromised would be that your account would be used for trolling, and quite possibly that doesn't bother you in the least. But what other computers do you use in similar ways? What about all those online stores you've probably given your credit card number to over the years - wanna bet all those are only operated by highly-trained security professionals? Because I don't. What about government agencies? We've hardly been short of "stolen $DEPARTMENT laptop held $MANY million citizens' personal details" scandals in recent years...
And I think we all know why so much spam comes from residential IP addresses, right?
Given which, I'd really rather there not be any malware at all for any operating system. An OS that has malware in the wild is an insecure OS. Just because all the malware requires user intervention doesn't mean the OS is secure. It means it's more secure, and clearly a superior choice over OSes that suffer from hands-off malware, but "more secure" doesn't mean "safe" any more than "growing up" means "mature".
Well, this news are for Open Office (and other open source office suites) what Vista was for Linux!
What - you mean it'll generate a load of excitement in the free-software community, with loads of people chiming in to prophesy doom for Microsoft and massive uptake of free software, but in reality it'll turn out that PHBs the world over will be so afraid of anything that isn't Microsoft that they'll do nothing at all for as long as possible, then grit their teeth and endure the painful upgrade to whatever it is that Microsoft has decreed they must use, just in time for that to be declared obsolete?
Seriously, I hate to burst your bubble here, but if you really think your average PHB is going to give even a moment's consideration to OpenOffice.org, you're deluding yourself. Listen to what average people are doing right now - they're complaining about how much they dislike Vista and about how much they hate the Office 2007 user interface, even as they continue to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007. These people are apparently literally incapable of realising that there's any alternative. And that's home users, who don't have to worry about getting fired for choosing something other than Microsoft...
(To all you PHBs out there: please prove me wrong. Please.)
It all depends how you count it. For example, here is a comparison based on available jobs that shows Perl still vastly in the lead, followed by PHP, with Python and Ruby both trailing by a long way. I'm sure there are other figures that prove that PHP is the biggest language, and yet others that show Ruby is growing fastest, etc. etc. etc.
TIOBE's methodology is distinctly suspect, too. Looking at search engine result counts - which are estimates, and in the case of Google are well documented to be inaccurate - is hardly scientific. And they're using YouTube as one of their search engines?! How is that going to produce meaningful figures?
(Yeah, I'm still bitter that ML is so unpopular. But you can't call me a Perl fanboy, because I dislike all "dynamic" programming languages equally, and program largely in C++ and OCaml.)
Since a few minutes of search can often break a bogus patent, I'd argue that the patent system itself is working OK.
I'd argue that a patent that can be shown to be bogus with just a few minutes of search should not have been issued in the first place. If the patent system was working OK, then the patent examiners would be doing those few minutes of search themselves, not rubber-stamping everything that lands on their desks and leaving it to the courts to determine what is and isn't bogus.
Not sure how the GGP proposal would help then, presumably the patent trolls will try to get people to license their patents as well (that is how they get money from them).
The thing about patent trolls is that they generally try to wait until people are already doing whatever their patent covers before they start trying to enforce it. If someone isn't already committed to the patented technology, they can just change their product to work round the patent; if they've been selling something that includes the patented technology for 10 years, they basically either have to license the patent on your terms or face an extended lawsuit that might lead to you being awarded massive damages.
If there was a requirement that a patent be in use or actively licensed to remain valid, this would not be an option: a patent troll couldn't suddenly try to enforce a patent after lying low for 10 years while the technology became popular. There might be unexpected downsides to this system as well, but on the face of it it does seem to provide a clear benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
The leaders of China stifle free speech, do not hold elections, and imprison political opponents: therefore they are dictators. The same goes for the leaders of countries like Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, arguably Pakistan, etc.
On the other hand, the leaders of countries like the USA, Canada, Britain, France, etc. encourage free political speech, hold elections that the majority even of their opponents believe are free and fair, and do not intimidate or imprison peaceful dissidents; therefore they are not dictators, by my definition.
Seems fairly clear and consistent to me, but I'm sure you'll find something to nitpick.
Look, people cope with different Windows systems behaving very differently every day. Different Linux distros are more different from one another, but not by all that much. The solution is education, not dumbing down.
The real problem is that people are much more forgiving towards Windows. When they can't get something working in Windows, they shrug resignedly and assume that God never meant it to happen. When they can't get something working in Linux, they assume Linux is crap and go back to Windows. And the only way we'll ever escape that is if we stop trying to sell Linux as a free or cheap replacement for Windows, because that makes people automatically assume it's going to be worse.
(Yeah, there's an X11 version, but X11 on OS X is a horribly clunky second-class citizen that most Mac users have never even heard of, let alone have installed, and would refuse to use if they saw it. That does not count as "works quite fine".)
It is this kind of wilfully irresponsible behaviour which is primarily responsible for the popular belief that BitTorrent itself is somehow inherently illegal. And it's long past time that legal users got together and stood up against the pirates, who are so determined to carry on infringing copyright that they may well drag all legal BitTorrent users down with them.
Plus, note that it says his ideas. Not other people's ideas. So 99.999999999% of content downloaded using TPB trackers is not covered by that clause anyway.
Oh, wait, did you mean the pirates' rights? Do please elaborate; I don't recall seeing a "right to download other people's IP for free" in any laws recently.
Sorry, but there is no defense in this case. Blocking BitTorrent per se would be trampling on people's rights, because BitTorrent is a neutral technology that is used for many legitimate purposes. But The Pirate Bay is not like that. There's a hint in the name, see? The Pirate Bay is openly and unashamedly dedicated to supporting and promoting illegal activity. Pirate Bay apologists are constantly telling us that the website itself is legal, and it's only the people who use it who are violating copyright law. Well, if that's the case, what exactly is wrong with stopping people from using it to violate copyright law?
Most people view such questions as shocking, revolting, taboo. We have collectively decided that such questions simply have no place in our lives. We do not need any explanations or justifications: the idea that all these groups have a fundamental and irrevocable right to exist is taken as axiomatic. It's one of the foundations of our modern western civilisation, period, and there is simply no further room for debate.
The question of whether men should be "allowed" to exist is the same question, asked in a different way. Therefore the answer, to people in our society, will be the same: of course men must be allowed to exist. No justification will be required.
(Not to invoke Godwin or anything, but there's a reason some people refer to extremist feminists as "feminazis". Their views are unlikely to become mainstream any time soon.)
The point remains that Python cannot be indented automatically. For example, consider the trivial example of There are three valid ways this could be indented, with the possible values of f(1) being None, 1, and 2. It is impossible for a computer to guess which is intended. Therefore, it is impossible in general to auto-indent Python code, QED.
"It's not a problem for me" is not a viable answer to "this is a problem for many people". Some people don't find Perl too hard to read, but that doesn't mean Perl isn't often hard to read. Some people don't find Ruby too slow, but that doesn't mean Ruby isn't often slow. And you don't find Python's significant whitespace a problem, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make life more difficult for the writers of IDEs and automatic code transformation tools.
Observe that the best-known other programming language with significant whitespace, Haskell, provides an alternative brace-and-semicolons syntax as an option for cases where whitespace is not the most readable choice. Python has already been heavily influenced by Haskell (that's where the idea for list comprehensions came from, for example); it's a shame that political and religious issues mean it's unlikely ever to copy this other very practical idea.
Except that it's a very unlikely thing to say sarcastically. The normal sarcastic approach would be to pretend that you care very much about the thing you don't care about, not to pretend you care about it a tiny bit.
Given which, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the "could care less" form comes from a mishearing or misunderstanding of the original "couldn't care less", not from a conscious attempt to be sarcastic. The "sarcasm" explanation is, I suspect, a retrospective attempt to rationalise the usage, based on an assumption that it would be somehow bad to use the idiom if it was illogical.
But the usage isn't bad just because it's illogical, any more than it's bad to say silly things like "it's raining cats and dogs", and nor is it inferior because it began as a mistake, any more than it's inferior to refer to one of those little green things as a "pea" rather than the older "pease". Language changes, and usually not in any logical way. None of this matters, because people don't analyse it as a set of individual words: they just recognise the complete idiom and understand its meaning without any interpretation of the words themselves. In fact, I bet most people don't even notice the difference between the two -- only those who have sensitized themselves to it by convincing themselves that it somehow matters which you use.
I ran into a fun problem with a shell script recently. Turned out that it relied on the setting of an environment variable that the "programmer" had in ~/.profile. Not documented, of course. It was hell to debug.
At least when Perl is missing a CPAN module it tells you exactly which module it's missing and refuses even to start the script, instead of getting halfway through what it's doing and then suddenly bailing out with an irrelevant message that doesn't even tell you where in the script the error occurred.
Also, things are complicated further by the ability to apply restricted versions of the same principle to statically compiled code. For example, you can profile a C/C++ program running with real data and then recompile using the generated profile to guide optimisation. I don't think I've seen any comparisons of that to runtime optimisations at all.
So it's hard to say whether Java really has any performance advantage or disadvantage overall. Better IMO to focus on the less disputable benefits, like Java's immunity to segfaults and buffer overflows, and that nice compile-once-run-anywhere setup.
Specific problems: why aren't you using strict? Why all the parens? Why are you using an eager "for" rather than a lazy "while" to scan a file? Why are you starting the regex with a pointless
The bare minimum to pass code review at any competent Perl shop would be something like and many would demand you split out the regex into a qr//, similar to what you did in the Python version, at which point you would also want to use the
Yeah, badly written Perl is arguably less readable than badly-written any-other-major-language, but anyone who starts any project in any language without adequate coding standards is asking for trouble. And Perl has some fairly good coding standards enforcement these days in the form of Perl::Critic.
Incidentally, a question for you: if you're a Python advocate, why the heck aren't you using named captures? They make regex matching vastly more readable and less fragile, and I believe Python has actually had them for longer than Perl has!
(Not a Perl fan or a Python fan, by the way; I tolerate Perl for some things where it's the only language available to me, but give me a nice static type system any day.)
Nice strawman. Back in reality, however, nobody was complaining about anyone celebrating cultural difference. (Nobody was even complaining about constructive criticism of problems with other cultures!) So your post was completely irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Now, would you care to actually address the point made in the post you were replying to? Are you going to stand up in public, preferably not posting anonymously, and explain why you believe it is not racist to throw around unsupported accusations that the Japanese people are obsessed with showing tentacle-rape pornography to minors?
I'm sure many of us would be interested to read a reasoned argument on the subject. There may well be a case to be made here. But logical fallacies don't strengthen it.
Maybe the worst thing that could happen if your Slashdot account details were compromised would be that your account would be used for trolling, and quite possibly that doesn't bother you in the least. But what other computers do you use in similar ways? What about all those online stores you've probably given your credit card number to over the years - wanna bet all those are only operated by highly-trained security professionals? Because I don't. What about government agencies? We've hardly been short of "stolen $DEPARTMENT laptop held $MANY million citizens' personal details" scandals in recent years...
And I think we all know why so much spam comes from residential IP addresses, right?
Given which, I'd really rather there not be any malware at all for any operating system. An OS that has malware in the wild is an insecure OS. Just because all the malware requires user intervention doesn't mean the OS is secure. It means it's more secure, and clearly a superior choice over OSes that suffer from hands-off malware, but "more secure" doesn't mean "safe" any more than "growing up" means "mature".
Seriously, I hate to burst your bubble here, but if you really think your average PHB is going to give even a moment's consideration to OpenOffice.org, you're deluding yourself. Listen to what average people are doing right now - they're complaining about how much they dislike Vista and about how much they hate the Office 2007 user interface, even as they continue to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007. These people are apparently literally incapable of realising that there's any alternative. And that's home users, who don't have to worry about getting fired for choosing something other than Microsoft...
(To all you PHBs out there: please prove me wrong. Please.)
It all depends how you count it. For example, here is a comparison based on available jobs that shows Perl still vastly in the lead, followed by PHP, with Python and Ruby both trailing by a long way. I'm sure there are other figures that prove that PHP is the biggest language, and yet others that show Ruby is growing fastest, etc. etc. etc.
TIOBE's methodology is distinctly suspect, too. Looking at search engine result counts - which are estimates, and in the case of Google are well documented to be inaccurate - is hardly scientific. And they're using YouTube as one of their search engines?! How is that going to produce meaningful figures?
(Yeah, I'm still bitter that ML is so unpopular. But you can't call me a Perl fanboy, because I dislike all "dynamic" programming languages equally, and program largely in C++ and OCaml.)
If there was a requirement that a patent be in use or actively licensed to remain valid, this would not be an option: a patent troll couldn't suddenly try to enforce a patent after lying low for 10 years while the technology became popular. There might be unexpected downsides to this system as well, but on the face of it it does seem to provide a clear benefit.