Did you read the article? The long tail is the critical collection of libraries and most of them will never be ported. People write new Python 2 libraries every day, actually--the list is getting longer, not shorter. That said, gevent is an extremely critical library for a lot of production Python 2 code. There doesn't even seem to be a roadmap to port it to Python 3.
I'm the author. I've never worked at Microsoft (where did you get that?). I'm a Linux guy.
The "lazy people" you refer to is 98% of the Python community.
Python 3 didn't "gain" static type checking. You can (and I do) run pylint against Python 2 code which is just static analysis, not full type checking. The situation here has not changed between Python 2 and 3.
Python is glue code. You write a small piece of Python to tie together external libraries. Moving a smallish piece of Python code from Python 2 to Python 3 often means porting several 3rd party libraries. If you were to move to Ruby, all you'd need to rewrite is your own code, as there are likely already 3rd party libraries which need no porting.
It's a common technique to serialize arbitrary data into blob fields in SQL databases--I've seen it for years. Usually, it is considered an anti-pattern. Postgres 9.1 doesn't do much other than verify the JSON data is valid JSON and then stores it unchanged, though successive versions are adding more first-class JSON support.
This isn't a search for SQL injection, its a search for a couple things that you often find in older PHP code that is generally hacked together and likely to have SQL injection vulnerabilities for historical and cultural reasons. However it's perfectly easy to avoid SQL injection even using these things.
$id = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['id']);
$res = mysql_query("SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE id='$id'");
That may be ugly, but it's bulletproof regarding injection.
I enjoyed using an earlier version of Linux Mint, but the default gnome-shell UI had a massive memory leak ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/930402 ) which was never fixed and "upgrades" to the next version are wipe-and-reinstall. So, I wiped it and installed Ubuntu 12.10 which I dist-upgrade to 13.04 without incident.
With no support and no upgrade path, I don't see what the draw is.
1. Does being a cretin or a jerk or whatever mean it is OK to be imprisoned for non-crimes?
2. He wasn't the one who started the comparisons with Aaron Swartz, from weev's tweet: "CNN is also sitting around calling me a meanie. I'm a bad troll, and no Aaron Swartz, the outraged masses cry!" Then he goes on to continue differentiate himself from Aaron, he never created or invited a positive comparison.
3. The article said he was sending messages to another person who was tweeting on his behalf. Why would he lose his right to free speech just because he has been convicted of a crime? Why wouldn't he be able to tweet (by proxy)?
"automatic merging" upon consensus -- had to laugh at this idea, the ratio of merge requests that would merge cleanly, automatically is low. Generally they have to be rebased against the exact branch they are to be merged against with human intervention to rectify not only merge conflicts and broken tests but possible interaction issues with recent changes on master branch. In any case, arbitrary changes can (and sometimes should) be made to bring the branch in line with the main code. So branch merges that were "voted in" still need human intervention to merge. Should that then be re-voted on, given that merges and conflict-resolved rebases/merges can include arbitrary changes? Obviously, but what if more changes go into the target branch while folks are getting around to ratifying the rebased merge branch? There still needs to be trusted "merge officers" or whatever who can and will clean up, test, and merge popular branches which were voted on. You can't get around that.