Good point raised in one of the comments: why not have a giant wind platform out at sea to generate the hydrogen, and have tankers come and offload/replace the hydrogen tanks on a continuous basis ?
I'm not sure about the causes, but it seems in the UK for example that social mobility has decreased in the past few decades compared to the 1960s. A big part of that has been the disaster of comprehensive education - the old grammar school system, which selected children from poorer families, gave at least some a chance of climbing the social ladder. Comprehensive schools are more of a lottery than a meritocracy, and the wealthy as always have the option of fee-paying "public" schools.
Absolutely agree with you on most of the points. A couple of quibbles - Django now supports multiple databases (as of 1.2) and South (http://south.aeracode.org/) is more or less the default migration tool nowadays and is OK for most jobs.
Personally, I find generic views to be useless for anything but the simplest of prototyping. Making them functions rather than callable classes was a big mistake IMHO. I very rarely use them in a serious project.
Another pet hate is UserProfiles - you have to use a separate model if you want any custom fields for your users which entails a join whenever you want to use it. It's been a ticket for years but nobody seems willing to fix it.
I agree with you 200% on templates and am in a very similar situation. Having to write convoluted code in template tags for the simplest of things is frustrating, when you can have simple function calls and template macros in Mako and Jinja2.
I'm not hugely fussed about AJAX myself - I tend to keep things simple in the views and just pass JSON back and forth and jQuery does most of the front-end work. I disliked the Rails way of binding everything to a particular JS library, not sure if it's still done that way any more.
Django is OK for certain projects. What annoys me though is that like Rails, it has gotten such mindshare in certain companies that they call themselves "Django shops" and want to use it for everything, without considering alternatives. Personally I stay well clear of it for my own projects - Pylons, Werkzeug, SQLAlchemy et al are a lot more fun to work with.
Who said anything about whining ? It is your duty as a professional to promote what you consider the best tool for the job. A spade isn't much good if your job is to rake some leaves.
Of course your advice might be overruled for perfectly valid technical or non-technical reasons. But by keeping silent and not suggesting alternatives you are doing yourself and your employer a disservice.
It's a great idea in theory, the problem is that corporate designs go through ten different committees each wanting something different, so you end up with an unusable mess.
Very nicely done. I take it this is running on Google App Engine ? (Just a guess, based on the Google Account signup).
No need to market it as just for rural locations. In the UK we have Gumtree for example, which is a serious competitor to Craigslist. While I agree to some extent with the idea of Craigslist's simplicity, I think it is becoming long in the tooth and unwilling to consider new ideas, and it's time for a decent, usable replacement.
Some IP-based geolocation would be nice. And some localization: "yard sale" and "apartment" for example are US terms. But that's nitpicking, which is a good sign :-)
Language is a big factor: English is the first foreign language taught in European schools (and the mother language of most UK and Irish citizens); Americans are traditionally poor at foreign languages, so are less likely to move to a country where they need to learn one.
Another factor is culture - America is more "welcoming" to ethnic minorities, and is built more or less on top of recent immigrants. European nations have a stronger ethnic identity which is less able or willing to accept new groups.
Really though you can't compare America to Europe in a single generalization - Poland, UK and Spain, to name a few, are completely different places, more so than, say, California and West Virginia. It will be impossible (and undesirable) to achieve the same kind of unity America has, not in this century anyway.
True, but as a marketable name bluebream leaves a lot to be desired...it doesn't roll off the tongue very well.
And what was with the weird YouTube video with the wedding song ?
A name change is a good idea - there was too much confusion between Zope 3 and Zope 2 - but they should have spent a little more time on thinking up the new name.
At the end of the day you succeed (in the larger world, not the Silicon Valley echo chamber) by having a great (or even good enough) product that hits the market at the right time, and can pretty much grow because you have customers willing to pay for it, directly or indirectly.
If all you have is a "me-too"|yet-another-Twitter-client that appeals only to the geek crowd, and has no viable business model, Silicon Valley is the place to be. Especially if you want to burn through early capital living in one of the most expensive locations in North America.
Django forms (and their non-Django counterpart, WTForms) are very easy to use, with a declarative syntax.
The advantage is that validation is decoupled from models. Often you need to handle validation which doesn't directly involve a single model - for example sending an email, or handling updates to a number of models. This saves you having to litter your controller/views with validation code.
Updated my Advent laptop from Jaunty a week ago, no significant issues. Can't say it's massively better than Jaunty in terms of features or performance though.
Otherwise it's crippled in comparison to Jinja or Mako - with large amounts of un-Pythonic boilerplate if you want to write template tags.
To an extent you can replace it but again you will have trouble with those "reusable" apps.