The implicit presumption in the Washington Post's analysis of it's own reporting is that both candidates deserved equal press. If Hitler were running against Ghandi, it might be "balanced" to make sure you say an equal number of nice things about both of them, but it wouldn't be sane.
Myself, I would argue that if the press actually had a commitment to truth, they would have to use words like "lied" a lot more when talking about politicians -- this particular season, the Republicans were running a negative smear campaign founded on deceptions. It must take a fair amount of restraint to report in a neutral tone when one side is spewing bullshit that you know they know is bullshit.
"Take your beating like a man --" I wish they had received a beating. Losing by 6 percent of the popular vote is better than they deserve, even with the continued loss of seats in the House.
Myself, I'd like to see the lame ducks impeached immediately before they do more damage.
When is a divided government not a divided government? When one party is intent on being a bunch of spineless rubber-stamps so that they won't be blamed for anything that goes wrong.
In re: the "young liberal/old conservative" business, my understanding is that we're actually seeing the opposite phenomena these days. Kids start out with libertarian master-of-industry fantasies, and move leftward as they get older.
Political scientists were predicting that with the current economic conditions there was no way that the incumbent party could stay in power -- and they were saying that before the melt-down and bail-out.
This is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.
This thread is for you to chatter and rant inanely about all the crap that everyone has gotten sick of hearing, in the hopes that you will get it out of your system, and not infect all of the other discussions with it.
Enjoy yourselves, shouting into the void.
... and I get home with my clothes stinking like smoke so bad that I feel like puking.
You raise an interesting, subtly-related issue. No doubt the unreconstructed libertarians here would argue that it is the right of the bar to set whatever smoking policy they choose, but the experience in places like SF and NY where it's been outlawed is that everyone, uh, "breathes a sigh of relief" about it, including the smokers.
It turns out that no one likes any one else's second-hand smoke, and where indoor-smoking is outlawed suddenly a social scene pops up out on the street where people can talk to each other (because, after all, the music is much quieter also).
It's little things like this that have turned me against libertarianism -- if you're going to go around claiming that you have some deep understanding "human nature" it's not a bad idea to actually, you know, observe human behavior and not just rely on theory.
It's not hard to ignore it unless there's something that interests you on.
That's not my experience in the least, and doesn't at all match my observation of other people's
behavior. Ever here the phrase "TVs kill parties"? The reason is the television trance phenomena.
And this is coming from a guy that watches way too much TV when he's home at night.
If you're a "always have the TV on" kind of person, of course you feel like you can ignore it when you need to, but I suspect your own perceptions on this -- much in the same way that drunks and cellphone users don't realize that their driving is impaired, the tv addict doesn't get that they'll have an easier time doing their homework with the box off.
Television screens in public places are a plague that are only going to get worse -- the TV-B-Gone was only a temporary solution, the manufactures responded quickly with ad-blasters that can't be shut-off so easily.
So, other than creating a public nuisance almost certain to result in getting your face punched, what EXACTLY is the point of this device?
The primary purpose of the Tv-b-gone is to turn off televisions, not to annoy people. If you want
to annoy people, you just hang out on the internet and post stupid messages. But you know all about that, right?
Get off your high horse and accept that some people relax using other methods than yours. The ability to enjoy the occasional sitcom or sports event is a positive sign of good mental adjustment.
Look, the weird think about television etiquette is that it's always regarded as acceptable to turn the things on, but turning it off requires a complicated process of polling every person present to find out if anyone is "really watching it". If you have a TV-B-Gone you can flip off the televisions, and if anyone cares, they'll have them turned back on, but it changes the bias in the situation.
There are many people running bars and restaurants who seem to feel that having the television on is an essential part of providing a homey atmosphere or something, and they're completely oblivious to the anti-social aspects of the television-trance phenomena. The TV-B-Gone lets you fix this problem without engaging in a philosophical debate with a low-level employee shuffling around the dining room.
I was out at a gathering in a bar not too long ago with dozens of people regarded me as a hero for getting rid of some (not all) of the fahrenheit-451-scale screens we were surrounded by. Hypothetically, I could've gotten to this point by harassing some extremely busy bartenders for ten minutes, but somehow I think the TV-B-Gone was the less annoying option.
The phrase "separation of church and state" comes from the writings of Thomas Jefferson -- the extra-constitutional writings of the founding fathers are often used to shed light on the intent of constitutional language.
The idea that strict literal interpretation of language is even possible often seems like something of a myth -- the reason we have judges is that we know we have to make judgement calls.
Phrases like "separation of church and state", "the right to privacy", and so on are used as short hand to refer to a complex of legal issues. The absence of these precise phrases from the Constitution does not invalidate them.
Consider the 9th amendment: isn't this a warning against excessively literal interpretation?
Anyone who cites the "Mission Accomplished" statement as some sort of gaffe is either purely partisan, or doesn't understand military operations.
Anyone who denies it is being willfully obtuse about staged events and media manipulation (it's not just "accidentally" standing in front of the sign, it was the whole deal, including posing in a flight suit).
Yes, it was an overt PR attempt (and that is a legitimate criticism),
And that makes the rest of what you're saying completely besides the point. None of us care what that banner meant to people in service on board the ship, the question is what it was supposed to mean to the people on the other end ot the TV cameras.
No one who cared to look into it, believed in the existence of Iraqi WMDs: the evidence was garbage, trumped up by the since discredited Judith Miller, and pumped up by Colin Powell (the absolute low-point of his career, a misguided display of "loyalty" to the Bush regime, as oppose to the United States). Anyone who was worried about Iraqi WMDS would've let the UN inspectors finish their jobs: they said it would take "weeks or months but not years" to finish -- instead the Bush regime hustled us into war, rather than take the chance that their pretext might evaporate.
You want to talk "extemist" views: they hid them in Syria? Why weren't they used to repel the US invasion? What the hell was the point of having them if not for that? Saddam Hussein decided he would rather take the fall than reveal his devilish secret?
Yes, the study is based on 72 male Americans in the LA region, if I read the "news" article correctly. Traditionally, people in the United States have confused the effects of years of abuse (e.g. guzzling alcohol) with the effects of aging -- it would take a lot of cross-cultural studies to pin down whether 39 is some sort of biologically hardwired magic number, or if it varies a lot with diet and exercise habits and so on.
And as for the poo-flinging: You people just go on ranting about how PHP is crappy, imature and oh-so-dead in the water.
Meanwhile Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, Cake, Symfony, Prado, ZendFW and EZ Publish carry on getting the job done. And gaining market share.
But it did all this without namespaces. Aren't you annoyed at them changing part of their winning formula?
But you know, half of the time when I try to use one of these wonderful PHP based web apps, I discover remarkable amounts of suckage. I use a Drupal-based events blog that gets confused about days and times. Once, I set someone up with a Horde/IMP webmail account, and it turned out to have a nasty, clunky UI, and the proper administration was too difficult for the ISP (mysterious errors about incompatible versions of something or other kept popping up, as I remember it).
PHP programmers discovered the "worse is better" principle, and took it to extremes.
It could be that the success of PHP goes very far to proving that "Languages Don't Matter" -- at the very least, you can compensate for flaws with coding standards, automated tests, and fanatic QA, or else Yahoo would be out of business.
Can you *please* stop spreading this anti-Perl FUD?
No, they probably can't. Mindless recitation is how they prove their intelligence.
Perl5 is neither the unmaintainable mess that Perl4 was, nor is it "dead" because Perl6 is being worked on.
If anyone here happens to like obnoxious jokes, try: "Perl6 is a scheme for turning Perl5 into a sane language by keeping Larry and Damien busy with something else."
Anyway, yeah, the perl 5.10 release had some interesting new features, and CPAN activity is running higher than it was during perl's supposed hey day. Perl's death has been greatly exaggerated.
Wow, you're a cool hepcat, daddio. I want to hang with you and your friends. They must be really smart, they say just what all the smart people are saying.
If you have a triple nested loop in the same function, you should refactor the code and move the inner loops into another function.
There are languages like perl where you can name your loops, to make it clear where you want to break to:
OUTER: foreach my $i (@x_vals) { foreach my $j (@y_vals) { next OUTER if out_of_bounds( $i, $j ); process( $i, $j ); } }
And in using subroutine calls inside of loops there's a tradeoff between readability and efficiency. You can't say dogmatically that one way is better than the other.
Excellent: this solves the IFF problem with robot police/soldiers by keeping a human being in the loop. I'm sure the human operator will never get confused while operating 3-5 drones. It will be no worse than switching between a half-dozen cellphone conversations while driving a car.
Warning: heavy-handed sarcasm may be present in this message.
There was a Long Now Foundation talk covering the early stages of this story by Iqbal Quadir. (He was the guy who had the idea that the Grameen bank could fund cellphone purchase in small rural areas). Here's their written summary of the talk:
Iqbal Quadir, "Technology Empowers the Poorest"
(If you poke around on the site you can find the video of it, or listen to the mp3):
[...] a remarkable invention of another Bangladeshi, Mohammad Yunus, who developed micro-financing (and later won a Nobel prize for this invention). In Yunus' scheme a woman who owned virtually nothing could get a loan of $200 to purchase a cow. She would then sell the surplus milk of the cow to pay back the loan, earn both milk and an income for her family, and maybe buy another cow. Ordinarily, no bank would have lent her this trifling amount because she had no collateral, no education, and the costs of overseeing such a small loan with small gains, would have been prohibitive. Grameen Bank, Yunus' creation, discovered that these illiterate peasants were actually more likely to repay these small loans, and were very happy to pay good interest rates, and so that in aggregate, these micro-loans were more profitable than loaning to large industrial players.
Quadir proceeded to ask, what if the women could rent a cell phone instead of a cow? Grameen Bank could make a micro-loan to the poor for the purchase a cell phone, which they then could sell/rent minutes to the rest of the village. The enterprising phone-renter would benefit and more importantly, the entire village would benefit from the connectivity. It did not really matter if the minutes were expensive, because when you have no connection, you are willing to pay dearly for it. Quadir started off his GrameenPhone with 5 cell towers, and eventually GrameenPhone erected 5,000 towers.
...and that's it's biggest problem. ZFS duplicates a lot of functionality that belongs outside of a filesystem. All of the above can already be done using any Linux filesystem, so why keep around a second copy of all that code that implements those features for just a single filesystem?
ReiserFS was (is) in a similar situation, where it also duplicates a lot of functionality that doesn't belong in the filesystem. Not only does this make it harder to maintain, but it makes a lot of features filesystem specific that shouldn't be.
This is a bit of a peeve of mine: the basic unix file-systems have been broken for so long, and people have gotten so used to dancing around their limitations, that you get people like this who can't imagine why you would want to actually fix the problems with them.
E.g. Who cares about being able to handle lots of small files? Everyone knows that you should very carefully pack all that data into large files that won't choke the glorious file system.
Slashdot Mirror
The implicit presumption in the Washington Post's analysis of it's own reporting is that both candidates deserved equal press. If Hitler were running against Ghandi, it might be "balanced" to make sure you say an equal number of nice things about both of them, but it wouldn't be sane.
Myself, I would argue that if the press actually had a commitment to truth, they would have to use words like "lied" a lot more when talking about politicians -- this particular season, the Republicans were running a negative smear campaign founded on deceptions. It must take a fair amount of restraint to report in a neutral tone when one side is spewing bullshit that you know they know is bullshit.
"Take your beating like a man --" I wish they had received a beating. Losing by 6 percent of the popular vote is better than they deserve, even with the continued loss of seats in the House.
Myself, I'd like to see the lame ducks impeached immediately before they do more damage.
When is a divided government not a divided government? When one party is intent on being a bunch of spineless rubber-stamps so that they won't be blamed for anything that goes wrong.
But it's not like I'm bitter, or anything.
In re: the "young liberal/old conservative" business, my understanding is that we're actually seeing the opposite phenomena these days. Kids start out with libertarian master-of-industry fantasies, and move leftward as they get older.
Political scientists were predicting that with the current economic conditions there was no way that the incumbent party could stay in power -- and they were saying that before the melt-down and bail-out.
This thread is for you to chatter and rant inanely about all the crap that everyone has gotten sick of hearing, in the hopes that you will get it out of your system, and not infect all of the other discussions with it. Enjoy yourselves, shouting into the void.
You raise an interesting, subtly-related issue. No doubt the unreconstructed libertarians here would argue that it is the right of the bar to set whatever smoking policy they choose, but the experience in places like SF and NY where it's been outlawed is that everyone, uh, "breathes a sigh of relief" about it, including the smokers. It turns out that no one likes any one else's second-hand smoke, and where indoor-smoking is outlawed suddenly a social scene pops up out on the street where people can talk to each other (because, after all, the music is much quieter also).
It's little things like this that have turned me against libertarianism -- if you're going to go around claiming that you have some deep understanding "human nature" it's not a bad idea to actually, you know, observe human behavior and not just rely on theory.
That's not my experience in the least, and doesn't at all match my observation of other people's behavior. Ever here the phrase "TVs kill parties"? The reason is the television trance phenomena.
If you're a "always have the TV on" kind of person, of course you feel like you can ignore it when you need to, but I suspect your own perceptions on this -- much in the same way that drunks and cellphone users don't realize that their driving is impaired, the tv addict doesn't get that they'll have an easier time doing their homework with the box off.
Television screens in public places are a plague that are only going to get worse -- the TV-B-Gone was only a temporary solution, the manufactures responded quickly with ad-blasters that can't be shut-off so easily.
Methinks some TV-swilling fools are a tad sensitive on this point.
The primary purpose of the Tv-b-gone is to turn off televisions, not to annoy people. If you want to annoy people, you just hang out on the internet and post stupid messages. But you know all about that, right?
Look, the weird think about television etiquette is that it's always regarded as acceptable to turn the things on, but turning it off requires a complicated process of polling every person present to find out if anyone is "really watching it". If you have a TV-B-Gone you can flip off the televisions, and if anyone cares, they'll have them turned back on, but it changes the bias in the situation.
There are many people running bars and restaurants who seem to feel that having the television on is an essential part of providing a homey atmosphere or something, and they're completely oblivious to the anti-social aspects of the television-trance phenomena. The TV-B-Gone lets you fix this problem without engaging in a philosophical debate with a low-level employee shuffling around the dining room.
I was out at a gathering in a bar not too long ago with dozens of people regarded me as a hero for getting rid of some (not all) of the fahrenheit-451-scale screens we were surrounded by. Hypothetically, I could've gotten to this point by harassing some extremely busy bartenders for ten minutes, but somehow I think the TV-B-Gone was the less annoying option.
Insert stupid joke about OP's own education.
Bonus points: spin the remark for or against "No Child's Behind Left".[1]
[1] Joke stolen from Greg Palast.
Anyone who denies it is being willfully obtuse about staged events and media manipulation (it's not just "accidentally" standing in front of the sign, it was the whole deal, including posing in a flight suit).
And that makes the rest of what you're saying completely besides the point. None of us care what that banner meant to people in service on board the ship, the question is what it was supposed to mean to the people on the other end ot the TV cameras.
No one who cared to look into it, believed in the existence of Iraqi WMDs: the evidence was garbage, trumped up by the since discredited Judith Miller, and pumped up by Colin Powell (the absolute low-point of his career, a misguided display of "loyalty" to the Bush regime, as oppose to the United States). Anyone who was worried about Iraqi WMDS would've let the UN inspectors finish their jobs: they said it would take "weeks or months but not years" to finish -- instead the Bush regime hustled us into war, rather than take the chance that their pretext might evaporate.
You want to talk "extemist" views: they hid them in Syria? Why weren't they used to repel the US invasion? What the hell was the point of having them if not for that? Saddam Hussein decided he would rather take the fall than reveal his devilish secret?
Yes, the study is based on 72 male Americans in the LA region, if I read the "news" article correctly. Traditionally, people in the United States have confused the effects of years of abuse (e.g. guzzling alcohol) with the effects of aging -- it would take a lot of cross-cultural studies to pin down whether 39 is some sort of biologically hardwired magic number, or if it varies a lot with diet and exercise habits and so on.
But it did all this without namespaces. Aren't you annoyed at them changing part of their winning formula?
But you know, half of the time when I try to use one of these wonderful PHP based web apps, I discover remarkable amounts of suckage. I use a Drupal-based events blog that gets confused about days and times. Once, I set someone up with a Horde/IMP webmail account, and it turned out to have a nasty, clunky UI, and the proper administration was too difficult for the ISP (mysterious errors about incompatible versions of something or other kept popping up, as I remember it).
PHP programmers discovered the "worse is better" principle, and took it to extremes.
It could be that the success of PHP goes very far to proving that "Languages Don't Matter" -- at the very least, you can compensate for flaws with coding standards, automated tests, and fanatic QA, or else Yahoo would be out of business.
Have you ever used a keyboard without an ESC key? The old DEC rainbows at Stanford all had "ESC" scribbled in black marking pen over the F11 keys.
No, they probably can't. Mindless recitation is how they prove their intelligence.
If anyone here happens to like obnoxious jokes, try: "Perl6 is a scheme for turning Perl5 into a sane language by keeping Larry and Damien busy with something else."
Anyway, yeah, the perl 5.10 release had some interesting new features, and CPAN activity is running higher than it was during perl's supposed hey day. Perl's death has been greatly exaggerated.
I think the root fault is letting people make lame excuses for writing badly structured, undocumented code (the language made me do it!).
Wow, you're a cool hepcat, daddio. I want to hang with you and your friends. They must be really smart, they say just what all the smart people are saying.
There are languages like perl where you can name your loops, to make it clear where you want to break to:
OUTER:
foreach my $i (@x_vals) {
foreach my $j (@y_vals) {
next OUTER if out_of_bounds( $i, $j );
process( $i, $j );
}
}
And in using subroutine calls inside of loops there's a tradeoff between readability and efficiency. You can't say dogmatically that one way is better than the other.
Excellent: this solves the IFF problem with robot police/soldiers by keeping a human being in the loop. I'm sure the human operator will never get confused while operating 3-5 drones. It will be no worse than switching between a half-dozen cellphone conversations while driving a car.
Warning: heavy-handed sarcasm may be present in this message.
There was a Long Now Foundation talk covering the early stages of this story by Iqbal Quadir. (He was the guy who had the idea that the Grameen bank could fund cellphone purchase in small rural areas). Here's their written summary of the talk: Iqbal Quadir, "Technology Empowers the Poorest" (If you poke around on the site you can find the video of it, or listen to the mp3):
This is a bit of a peeve of mine: the basic unix file-systems have been broken for so long, and people have gotten so used to dancing around their limitations, that you get people like this who can't imagine why you would want to actually fix the problems with them.
E.g. Who cares about being able to handle lots of small files? Everyone knows that you should very carefully pack all that data into large files that won't choke the glorious file system.