But if by going 10mph faster I pass the slow driver and make it through the next stoplight that he misses I'm at least 3 minutes ahead. I'm also now ahead of the 10-15 cars that pulled into the lane between us, putting me through the next light that much sooner saving several more minutes...adding up to a 30 minute commute instead of a 60 minute commute. Do the Math!
And if you hit someone, you can lose an entire day (if not your life), the price of the car, the cost of increased insurance premiums, and even
if you don't hit someone you're probably cutting your gas mileage in half.
People's attitudes toward car driving is one of those things that makes me doubt human sanity:
"Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do."
"Well sure, everyone knows that." ( But not for ME! I'm GOOD! It's those other suckers that have to watch it! )
So, I *believe* that there's massive fraud. But I have been prevented from investigating properly, as have been many others. So it's not possible to nail it down legally. The result is that I have to say "probable" and "incompetent" because I cannot legally say "they are liars and thieves".
Ah, I get it. You're stuck on the "innocent until proven guilty" slogan. But you ain't the judge, and we're not at present
talking about throwing anyone in jail: there is no reason we need to apply the criteria of the US criminal justice system in our
estimates of what probably happened.
It is admittedly adviseable to tone down the rhetoric when one is discussing this point, though, because it's all too easy to be dismissed as a crank if you know more about the subject than average. Myself, I try to stick to something like "there is some reason to doubt the integrity of the 2004 election,
and the issue has never been throughly investigated".
It is clear that none of the major voting system suppliers have bothered with the most basic architecture, design, verification and validation methodologies.
And for some reason, you're assuming that this is solely a matter of incompetence and not corruption, in spite of evidence that the problems with these things skewed the election in a particular direction?
Just out of curiosity, would you mind stating (1) where you live, and (2) what forms of public transportation you use to avoid having to rely on a car? It's an honest question.
If you're asking me, I live in San Francisco, and use the busses and trains to get around (when I'm not walking or riding a bike).
I understand the problems of living in a place as spread out as Texas, but these are self-reinforcing problems we're talking about here:
post WWII, America went ape-shit building places that assumed everyone was traveling around via cars, and amazingly enough, it's hard to think of any way to get around them besides cars.
These aren't going to be problems we fix over night, but you'd think we could at least get a consensus on where we want to be twenty-five years from now (e.g. low-density suburban zoning regulations should be regarded as the anti-social monstrosities that they are).
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Robert J. Hanlon
Honest, I didn't mean to shoot him! I didn't know the gun was loaded.
Diebolds problem is incompetent management that is more concerned
with minimizing the bottom line by being cheap with their
programmers and trying to make up for their crappy software with
marketing, lobbyists, and lawyers instead of fixing the problems.
And you base this opinion on what, precisely?
Myself, I think that's insanely optimistic. The 2004 election
showed odd discrepancies in the exit polls in Bushes favor, and
they correlated with battle ground states and the use of
electronic voting machines.
Yes Virginia, vote fraud happens, and sometimes it even happens
here.
Yes, don't you love how those scheming, conniving Republicans, who had only to push around a few bits to tweak the results, manipulated the elections to throw both houses of Congress to the Democrats last year?
And you may joke if you like, but a lot of us were seriously afraid that the Republican vote-corruption machine was strong
enough to dial in whatever result they wanted, and not just act like a heavy finger on the scale.
There really isn't any question that the 2004 presidential election was dirty, the only question is "how dirty", and no one seems to have cared enough to want to find out.
At a guess, the way us pro-nuclear folks will respond is to ask embarrassing questions about peak load (it ain't enough to have cheap solar generation, you also need to store it somehow to keep the lights on when the sun is down). I'm also wondering a bit about trading off real estate costs vs. transmission line losses for these plants (once the roofs are covered, then how do you keep expanding).
I should add that in fact very few people on either side of the argument have done sufficient research to make their pronouncements.
Yeah, and you know what? I can't figure out why anyone even cares that much.
On the one hand, coal power kills a few hundred thousand US citizens a year, and on the other hand
it may be destroying the planet. Any way you look at it, why shouldn't coal power
be "enemy number one"?
As for oil, just take a look at the "foreign entanglements" involved (not to mention some of
the slimey corporations)... do you need to have the global environment threatened to make
up ypur mind to be anti-coal?
And as for cars... let's say burning gas caused no problems whatsoever, you've still got 50 thousand American deaths per year
because of "car accidents", not to mention the many any various ways cars-on-the-brain have warped community planning. What
does it take to convince people it'd be a good idea to reduce reliance on cars and ramp up public transit?
Your ideas about the environmental impact of coal are better suited for the 19th century, not the 21st. Coal is cleaner than ever
Great! So you mean we can expect to see the number of US deaths attributable to coal every year to gradually decline below the hundreds of thousands level? And please tell us about the New Technology the coal industry has to reduce emissions of radioactive crud... do you think they'll be able
to operate under the same rules as nuclear plants now without being shut down?
(If you ask me, it's coal burning that belongs in the 19th century, if not the 18th...)
But they have a choice about using. Lots of people also go "off grid". Any homeowner can do it, if they want to put their money where their mouth is. It costs tens of thouseands of dollars, though.
Not to mention the gasoline involved... those guys playing at being "mountain men in the wilderness" all depend on the federal government keeping gas cheap so their trucks can keep guzzling.
It was a pretty good talk, I thought, with the information on the storage of nuclear waste in salt formations being some of the more interesting material.
But they lead off with a flat assertion that nothing but nukes will
do to supply our energy needs in the absence of "fossil fuels" -- that's a point that needs more support than that. Myself, I believe they're correct,
but alt.energy freaks aren't just going to take someone's word for it. This interview is similar, just mentioning "base load" power without explaining much about it. Maybe her book goes into this in more detail, haven't read it yet, myself.
After RTGDFA, I see that the sample size is 26, and there's no reason at all to think the result has anything to do with addictive behavior, that's entirely speculative.
I'm very curious to know. Are the vendors of voting machines just
cynical, and believe that nobody really cares about security and
that they can pull the wool over the eyes of the people who make
the buying decisions?
Well, you're asking for speculation about motives (essentially
you're asking the "malice or ignorance?" question), which makes
it difficult to say anything with any certainty, but the major
voting machine companies are run by people with personal
connections to each other, and these people are politically
connected with well-known Republican biases.
Further, there was an interesting incident with a programmer
whistle-blower who claimed he had been approached by someone who
wanted to be able to rig elections.
So myself, I think the answer is "malice": these machines are
designed with election rigging in mind.
I started playing w/ PHP before it was ready for primetime, apparently, and while Perl has a lot of quirks, but unlike PHP there are relatively few things that stand out as being that way because it was easier for the implementor of the language to do it that way...
You mean, except for the complete absence of any namespaces in PHP?
PHP's technical advantages, as I understand it, are (1) a smaller
memory footprint; and (2) ISP's seem to feel it's easier for them to support.
I can see how those would be regarded as a win (in some circumstances), but it doesn't explain why the language purists aren't
jumping up and down about how PHP is completely unsuited to large projects, and produces maintenance nightmares, and so on.
we all know that language snobs dislike perl -- why they appear to dislike it more than the far-worse PHP is hard to discern, but clearly they do
Actually, it occurs to me that I probably do know why perl
provokes such rabid responses, I think it's because of "The State
of the Onion" talks.
"Larry has turned what was a gentleman's war
into guerrilla tactics. He consistently and
cleverly (I never said he wasn't brilliant)
slanders other languages and language
communities, and encourages this behavior
in his lieutenants." -- Steve Yegge
I don't know where Yegge got this "gentleman's war" stuff --
when I got started in this game, Nikalaus
Wirth was making pronouncements about how a generation
of programmers have had their brains irreparably damaged
by programming in Basic (and Larry Wall alludes to
this in his talk).
I think what's really going on here is that like most
"gentleman's" rules, it's only intended to protect you if
you're a member of the club. The club got very upset at
Wall for daring to suggest that there might be some limitations
to their worldview (most "computer scientists" are really
mathematicians trying hard to pretend that they're still doing math).
That's the really unforgivable thing.
In contrast, the PHP culture is just happy they're doing better
than ASP, and makes no explicit philosophical statements
about language design.
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever
on
State of the Onion 11
·
· Score: 1
timster wrote:
That sounds great, until you're trying to work with someone
else's Perl code and it turns out that they have a special
fondness for those Perl features which were inspired by awk. A
language with a clean design means that you can collaborate with
others.
Which explains why Lisp is the leading programming used
throughout the industry.
The trouble with the line you're taking is that you
run into problems with "the waterbed theory of complexity":
If you simplify the language, the libraries get more complicated.
On average, do you expect it to be eaiser for an intermediate
user to look-up information on an unfamiliar core language
feature, or on an unfamiliar library feature?
Is it just me, or is this his worst presentation in a while?
Yes, it's just you. Last year's collection of family pictures was way too fluffy, essentially
a punt. This year's, by comparison, is an interesting overview of some technical issues, with
a few interesting little quips tossed in. It's not as brilliant as his "postmodern computer language" talk,
for example, but it's nothing to complain about.
I think the real trouble with these talks is that Larry Wall doesn't really have an overview of the whole onion any more.
The perl 5 world is chugging along without him at this point, and he doesn't really know what's going on with it
(or he might've said something about pluggable regexp engines, for example), and perl 6, if not exactly stalled out, hasn't had a lot of changes in the big picture of late, so what is there really to say?
I think most people have a rough idea where Perl is now (present,
though likely slipping as a % of interesting code being written)
and where it's going
It's not entirely clear what you're getting at here, but this
brings up a bit of a peeve with me: we all know that lanugage
snobs dislike perl -- why they appear to dislike it more than the
far-worse PHP is hard to discern, but clearly they do -- but you
shouldn't jump from that to the conclusion that use of perl is
dwindling. For example, if you look at CPAN activity, there's a
hell of a lot of stuff going on out there, supposedly more-so
than during the dot.com era. Or if you look at the features of
the upcoming perl 5.10 release, there's a lot of cool stuff being
added to perl 5, which continues to be under active development.
As far as commercial interest goes, there's a lot of jobs
out there using perl and I've heard that perl programmers tend
to get paid a little more than Java (one of the disadvantages of
following the fads is that you risk becoming a glut on the market).
One of the worse things about Perl 6 is the threat of an "Osborne
Effect": a lot of people assume that because it's running late
that means that the perl overall is in bad shape, but that's
hardly the case.
perl 5.10 should not be neglected (Re:Fine by me)
on
State of the Onion 11
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
perl 5.8 does everything I need it to. There are other languages
I use when Perl doesn't do what I need it to.
perl 5.10 is about to be released, and it has a number of
significant improvements over perl 5.8. Off the top of my head:
it has a real "switch" statement included (as originally designed
for perl 6), it has recursive regular expressions that can be
used to do Text::Balanced sorts of things (if for some reason
that now-standard module doesn't do it for you), and a number of
new modules have been added to the standard library.
I view Perl 6 as an continued employment mechanism for those who write books about Perl and teach Perl to others.
At the present, I look at Perl 6 as an attempt at turning perl
into a saner, more rational language, by keeping Larry and Damien
busy with something else.
Even so, I'm still interested in seeing where it goes. Unlike
commercial projects, open source projects can continue to stagger
forward to success long after many people have given up
hope (e.g. Mozilla/firefox).
Slashdot Mirror
And if you hit someone, you can lose an entire day (if not your life), the price of the car, the cost of increased insurance premiums, and even if you don't hit someone you're probably cutting your gas mileage in half.
People's attitudes toward car driving is one of those things that makes me doubt human sanity:
"Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do."
"Well sure, everyone knows that." ( But not for ME! I'm GOOD! It's those other suckers that have to watch it!
)
Ah, I get it. You're stuck on the "innocent until proven guilty" slogan. But you ain't the judge, and we're not at present talking about throwing anyone in jail: there is no reason we need to apply the criteria of the US criminal justice system in our estimates of what probably happened.
It is admittedly adviseable to tone down the rhetoric when one is discussing this point, though, because it's all too easy to be dismissed as a crank if you know more about the subject than average. Myself, I try to stick to something like "there is some reason to doubt the integrity of the 2004 election, and the issue has never been throughly investigated".
And for some reason, you're assuming that this is solely a matter of incompetence and not corruption, in spite of evidence that the problems with these things skewed the election in a particular direction?
If you're asking me, I live in San Francisco, and use the busses and trains to get around (when I'm not walking or riding a bike).
I understand the problems of living in a place as spread out as Texas, but these are self-reinforcing problems we're talking about here: post WWII, America went ape-shit building places that assumed everyone was traveling around via cars, and amazingly enough, it's hard to think of any way to get around them besides cars.
These aren't going to be problems we fix over night, but you'd think we could at least get a consensus on where we want to be twenty-five years from now (e.g. low-density suburban zoning regulations should be regarded as the anti-social monstrosities that they are).
Well, the death penalty for hired sock-puppets wouldn't hurt, either.
Honest, I didn't mean to shoot him! I didn't know the gun was loaded.
And you base this opinion on what, precisely?
Myself, I think that's insanely optimistic. The 2004 election showed odd discrepancies in the exit polls in Bushes favor, and they correlated with battle ground states and the use of electronic voting machines.
Yes Virginia, vote fraud happens, and sometimes it even happens here.
There's an argument that the great democratic "landslide" should've been a lot bigger: Ohio's 2006 Vote Count Now Includes A Higher Percentage Of Uncounted ballots than in 2004, And A Statistically Impossible Swing To The Republicans
And you may joke if you like, but a lot of us were seriously afraid that the Republican vote-corruption machine was strong enough to dial in whatever result they wanted, and not just act like a heavy finger on the scale.
There really isn't any question that the 2004 presidential election was dirty, the only question is "how dirty", and no one seems to have cared enough to want to find out.
Yeah, and you know what? I can't figure out why anyone even cares that much. On the one hand, coal power kills a few hundred thousand US citizens a year, and on the other hand it may be destroying the planet. Any way you look at it, why shouldn't coal power be "enemy number one"?
As for oil, just take a look at the "foreign entanglements" involved (not to mention some of the slimey corporations)... do you need to have the global environment threatened to make up ypur mind to be anti-coal?
And as for cars... let's say burning gas caused no problems whatsoever, you've still got 50 thousand American deaths per year because of "car accidents", not to mention the many any various ways cars-on-the-brain have warped community planning. What does it take to convince people it'd be a good idea to reduce reliance on cars and ramp up public transit?
MBraynard wrote:
Great! So you mean we can expect to see the number of US deaths attributable to coal every year to gradually decline below the hundreds of thousands level? And please tell us about the New Technology the coal industry has to reduce emissions of radioactive crud... do you think they'll be able to operate under the same rules as nuclear plants now without being shut down?
(If you ask me, it's coal burning that belongs in the 19th century, if not the 18th...)
On the one hand:
- Bush energy plan includes coal-burning power plants
-
Bush: Kyoto treaty would have hurt economy
And on the other hand:- Clinton Blasts Bush On Kyoto Pact -- Ex-President Says Current President 'Flat Wrong' On Global Warming
- Barack Star -- Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama's got green cred
I think the Republicans have a very bad "not-invented here" problem where environmentalism is concerned.Not to mention the gasoline involved... those guys playing at being "mountain men in the wilderness" all depend on the federal government keeping gas cheap so their trucks can keep guzzling.
My thought exactly, except I was remembering the joys of the BQE in New York.
I also remember reading about this (stunningly obvious) result back in the pre-web days...
Gwyneth Cravens (along with Rip Anderson) gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation series some months ago:
- Summary by Stewart Brand
Audio files:It was a pretty good talk, I thought, with the information on the storage of nuclear waste in salt formations being some of the more interesting material.
But they lead off with a flat assertion that nothing but nukes will do to supply our energy needs in the absence of "fossil fuels" -- that's a point that needs more support than that. Myself, I believe they're correct, but alt.energy freaks aren't just going to take someone's word for it. This interview is similar, just mentioning "base load" power without explaining much about it. Maybe her book goes into this in more detail, haven't read it yet, myself.
What is this doing on the front page of slashdot?
You might look at some of Steven F. Freeman's papers, like this one: Polling Bias or Corrupted Count? (pdf file).
Nope. Just the good old US corporate media. "Nothing to see here, just a bunch of conspiracy nuts on the internet"
dpbsmith wrote:
Well, you're asking for speculation about motives (essentially you're asking the "malice or ignorance?" question), which makes it difficult to say anything with any certainty, but the major voting machine companies are run by people with personal connections to each other, and these people are politically connected with well-known Republican biases.
Further, there was an interesting incident with a programmer whistle-blower who claimed he had been approached by someone who wanted to be able to rig elections.
So myself, I think the answer is "malice": these machines are designed with election rigging in mind.
This doesn't sound anything like the San Francisco Perl Mongers group I hang around with... neither does it sound much like the gang at perlmonks.org.
Sorry if you were traumatized by Tom Christensen, but maybe you need to grow some skin, you know?
You mean, except for the complete absence of any namespaces in PHP?
PHP's technical advantages, as I understand it, are (1) a smaller memory footprint; and (2) ISP's seem to feel it's easier for them to support.
I can see how those would be regarded as a win (in some circumstances), but it doesn't explain why the language purists aren't jumping up and down about how PHP is completely unsuited to large projects, and produces maintenance nightmares, and so on.
Actually, it occurs to me that I probably do know why perl provokes such rabid responses, I think it's because of "The State of the Onion" talks.
I don't know where Yegge got this "gentleman's war" stuff -- when I got started in this game, Nikalaus Wirth was making pronouncements about how a generation of programmers have had their brains irreparably damaged by programming in Basic (and Larry Wall alludes to this in his talk).
I think what's really going on here is that like most "gentleman's" rules, it's only intended to protect you if you're a member of the club. The club got very upset at Wall for daring to suggest that there might be some limitations to their worldview (most "computer scientists" are really mathematicians trying hard to pretend that they're still doing math). That's the really unforgivable thing.
In contrast, the PHP culture is just happy they're doing better than ASP, and makes no explicit philosophical statements about language design.
GENTLE_ART_OF_PROGRAMMING
timster wrote:
Which explains why Lisp is the leading programming used throughout the industry.
The trouble with the line you're taking is that you run into problems with "the waterbed theory of complexity": If you simplify the language, the libraries get more complicated.
On average, do you expect it to be eaiser for an intermediate user to look-up information on an unfamiliar core language feature, or on an unfamiliar library feature?
Yes, it's just you. Last year's collection of family pictures was way too fluffy, essentially a punt. This year's, by comparison, is an interesting overview of some technical issues, with a few interesting little quips tossed in. It's not as brilliant as his "postmodern computer language" talk, for example, but it's nothing to complain about.
I think the real trouble with these talks is that Larry Wall doesn't really have an overview of the whole onion any more. The perl 5 world is chugging along without him at this point, and he doesn't really know what's going on with it (or he might've said something about pluggable regexp engines, for example), and perl 6, if not exactly stalled out, hasn't had a lot of changes in the big picture of late, so what is there really to say?
It's not entirely clear what you're getting at here, but this brings up a bit of a peeve with me: we all know that lanugage snobs dislike perl -- why they appear to dislike it more than the far-worse PHP is hard to discern, but clearly they do -- but you shouldn't jump from that to the conclusion that use of perl is dwindling. For example, if you look at CPAN activity, there's a hell of a lot of stuff going on out there, supposedly more-so than during the dot.com era. Or if you look at the features of the upcoming perl 5.10 release, there's a lot of cool stuff being added to perl 5, which continues to be under active development. As far as commercial interest goes, there's a lot of jobs out there using perl and I've heard that perl programmers tend to get paid a little more than Java (one of the disadvantages of following the fads is that you risk becoming a glut on the market).
One of the worse things about Perl 6 is the threat of an "Osborne Effect": a lot of people assume that because it's running late that means that the perl overall is in bad shape, but that's hardly the case.
Even so, I'm still interested in seeing where it goes. Unlike commercial projects, open source projects can continue to stagger forward to success long after many people have given up hope (e.g. Mozilla/firefox).