It is safer to be a carbon chauvinist if you accept that ancient Mars was covered with oceans. A silicon-based microbe would be hard pressed to explain its distaste for water to its carbon-based neighbor.
There are localization issues as well. Some place names in Turkey appear to be transferred over from legacy windows-1254 code page (e.g. Avcılar displayed as Avcýlar) Some have replacement letters for certain characters (dotless i, ş, ç, ğ). For example, "Sık orman" (dense forest) became "Sik orman" (penis forest).
Overall (at least in Turkey) the legends appear to come from an old, low quality source.
I agree with your first paragraph but not with the Django example. User.objects.get(id=1) failing is exceptional because you are asking for an object with a specific and unique property. Otherwise, you would be using User.objects.filter(age>20) (which doesn't throw an exception).
There are languages with true alphabets, ie. there is a one-to-one relation with written letters and sounds. A good example is Turkish. Once you learn the sounds of the 29 letters in the alphabet, you can perfectly pronounce all Turkish words.
I believe there is a way around this. Google doesn't need to hide or remove pro-SOPA search results. Making them harder to find would be equally effective. Something like this perhaps?
In order to show you the highest quality results, we have omitted some entries.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
It would be interesting to see how Google would handle the fig sign [1]. It represents the letter T in ASL, but it is considered quite a rude gesture (cunt in Turkish, for example) in many Eastern-European cultures.
Don't skip (as I did) steps 15-19. Otherwise, you'll wait a week before GoDaddy releases the domain to your new registrar. When you manually accept the transfer as described in the blog post, the process should complete in a few hours.
But what happens if one of those sites lose their user database? Your other accounts would be compromised and you would have to change your passwords in every site you registered with the same password.
Then WM_DESTROY should have been called NM_DESTROY, since it is clearly a notification message not a command. The user is not wholly innocent here, but the Windows API team should be blamed for the misleading naming as well.
Change your work environment if you can. I lately started working one or two days a week at a friend's office. It worked wonders for me. I have a lot less distractions this way. First of I have no coworkers there. And second, clients call me less, only if it is really important. I suspect this is because they actually need to look up a number to reach me, and that cuts down a lot of noise.
Same happened in Turkey this month (#22agustos). The Anon DDoS was portayed as a failure in Turkish media, and the government took credit for successfully fighting off the "cyber-attack". I wonder what would happen if it was LulzSec instead of Anon.
There are only a handful of browsers that doesn't support javascript today [1]. There also users consciously disabling scripting on their modern browsers but they don't add up to a significant percent of browser users [2]. The second argument that an external .js file can fail to load applies to the .css file as well.
There may be arguments against the modernizr approach, but the ones in the article are quite weak.