Python 2 will store Unicode as either UCS-16 or UCS-32, depending on how it was compiled. The horrible monstrosity that is the default "string" (those are scare quotes; I know how the formatting on here works) in Python 2 is not Unicode, so it obviously doesn't use UCS-16 or UCS-32.
If you honestly believe that all you have to do is stand up a bunch of instances of Mongo/Cassandra/whatever and you instantly get acceptable HA, then you need to read the [Jepsen series](https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen)
Having used them both a fair bit (though not to write novels, like some of the people on here): Markdown source is prettier to look at. This might seem minor, but it's the primary goal of Markdown. If I'm writing something highly technical, I prefer RST; if I'm writing something closer to plain English, I prefer Markdown.
I use Eclipse (now that I no longer have an IntelliJ license) for doing heavy-duty Java, but if I can get away with it, I prefer to do things in MacVim. Eclipse is just too clunky feeling when I want to do simple text editing tasks; it totally throws me out of my flow. That's why I'm on HN right now, as a matter of fact. So clearly, I am not an unbiased observer. That said: have you tried Pathogen/Vundle? Vim plugin management these days is light-years better than the equivalent Eclipse nightmare (I've given up on about half my Eclipse plugins as things constantly break).
I'm pretty sure it hoses Norton's "security" software, too. Of course, if you can't handle documented file system options, I don't trust you to detect exploits….
For a lot of dynamic languages, at least, the templating engine is a surprisingly large portion of your page load times. I wish I could bring up the breakdown I saw a while back, but it's certainly non-trivial in many cases.
Less than a year? That's really short. Have you tried busting out a multimeter on your wiring (since you sound like the DIY type) or calling an electrician?
You won't see me saying that I think Groupon is a great value or anything, but I think that you have to acknowledge the difference between the people Groupon is reaching and the people FB or Google is reaching: Groupon's audience is people who are actively looking to spend money, whereas most of the people who see Google or FBs ads are doing something else entirely (and would probably not notice if they just went away).
These articles are cropping up because Google (quite cleverly) utilized the "We're Open" mantra to gain a lot of momentum very quickly. Since the evolution of Android shows more and more evidence of "We're Open When Convenient/Beneficial", a lot of their most ardent supporters now feel betrayed/played.
If Google had said "We're not as secretive as Apple", there would be less bitterness now, but there also never would have been the sort of momentum/buzz they built early on.
A lot of Spring code predates the rising popularity of "convention over configuration" (thank you, Rails, for getting this so widely accepted), so if you're in one of those code bases, you're going to see a LOT of the Java+XML verbosity that led to everyone lampooning Java.
In exchange, you get a ton of flexibility. You probably only need 5-10% of it, but that 5-10% is NICE. The ability to do clean testing of your data tier, for instance, is glorious when you first experience it. Goodbye, horrible ResultSet mocks!
If you're lucky enough to work on a codebase that fully embraces autowiring and all the spiffy new annotations, then you get all this awesome stuff, but with virtually none of the crazy XML configuration stuff that makes it impossible to just trace the source and figure out what the hell is going on.
For Java web frameworks, Play! http://www.playframework.org/ is definitely on the top of my list for green-field projects. I've only used it on small things so far, but it really seems to have learned the lessons of Django and Rails.
https://github.com/weavejester/compojure is on my To-Try list for Clojure stuff. Until I get around to it, I'm just monitoring buzz on the web, but so far it's been mostly positive.
That's an interesting point about it never making the price go up. If there were a non-trivial chance that it caused the price to go up, do you think the haggling would be less common?
Since haggling vaguely offends my sense of how the world should work—even though I know that has no bearing on how it does work—it kinds gives me the warm fuzzies to imagine some random procurement person's expression as the price goes up every time s?he asks for a discount.