There's really nothing wrong with programming on a current iMac. Anodized aluminum, so people won't laugh at you.... No more embarrassing colors copied straight off a queer-pride flag
Yes indeedy. As a Serious Applications Developer, the first and only criterion I have for selecting a development box is the color of its case, and in particular whether or not people will laugh at it.
The truth is that the further you dig into B.O.'s terrorist/criminal connections, the more you find. We've hardly scratched the surface. The PLO, Hamas, Arab American Action Network, Black Panthers, Weather Underground, ACORN, Nation of Islam, CAIR,... This guy doesn't seem to have any connections that ARE clean!
Do you have any idea how paranoid you sound? Here's a clue: if EVERY piece of evidence you find points in the direction of your pre-supposed conclusion, you're probably misreading the evidence (or, more likely, someone else has misread it for you, as part of a failed smear campaign).
HER JOB is Governor of Alaska, not watchdog of the Supreme Court.
Actually, the job she is applying for is Vice President of the United States. Given that that is a fairly important job, I would expect her to have the requisite knowledge to do it, or I wouldn't hire her.
If there's really any "flaw" to the concept of having totally unregulated free markets, it's probably that it's a concept thought of by intelligent "long term" thinkers.
I'd say the "flaw" is in deciding just what "unregulated" means. In the extreme case, an unregulated market would allow anyone to do literally anything... including, say, kidnapping your competitor's CEO and holding him for ransom. Clearly that's not acceptable, so there has to be SOME regulation. So now you have to figure out where to draw the line. But where? Is racial discrimination in making loan decisions acceptable? Is the use of Microsoft-style monopoly tactics to squeeze out your competition considered okay, or not? Why? Etc. And pretty soon, you're back to our current system again, with a muddle of regulations, some effective, some not.
Free markets sound good in theory, but in real life they quickly degenerate back into what we have now. If the government doesn't regulate, then the most aggressive (and most powerful) private entities will step in and make their own "regulations" (enforced by their economic power), the difference being that their regulations will not be arrived at through any sort of democratic process, and will inevitably server their own interests alone.
And if you're honest, [Bush] doesn't pull Scientific frauds.
Have you been reading the news at all the last eight years? Every time the EPA came out with a study that indicated global warming, the Bush administration would rewrite and/or suppress the report. If that's not fraud, I don't know what is.
Fission very well could be, but half-vast fission we've been saddled with as a result of the Carter administration's (the one president who should've known better, btw, what with his degree in nuclear engineering) machinations.
Perhaps President Carter (with his degree in nuclear engineering) had some insight into the risks involved? Perhaps he made the right decision, or at least the right decision at the time.
The debates are a farce. The U.S. political system is a farce. Dems? Farce. GOP? Farce.
The answer is clear. Of our two current choices, none are good. We must find another choice.
When Nader speaks, I hear him telling the truth, at least as he sees it. That makes him the only candidate worth of election.
The idea that the electorate of the US (1/3rd of whom are Obama fans, 1/3rd of whom are McCain fans, and 1/3rd of whom are clueless) is going to wake up some time in the next 40 days and decide to coalesce around Ralph Nader? Farce.
Seriously, as much as you may like Ralph Nader, it just isn't going to happen in 2008. That ship has sailed.
Why are we stuck with choosing between two candidates that both want to increase the scope and cost of the federal government?
As for why you are struck choosing between just two candidates: that's how a winner-take-all electoral system works. If you want more than two viable candidates in an election, you'll need to convince the country to use a more robust electoral system.
As for why both of them want to increase the scope and cost of the federal government: it's likely that promising people more and better government services is a winning political strategy. (whether it's also a viable way to run the country, I leave as an exercise for the reader)
My religion teaches, and I believe, that every man should be free to believe and worship according to their own conscience. Naturally, I support the second amendment to the Constitution. There are those who want to restrict the worship of others, in violation of the free exercise clause.
That's only true if you define "reason" as "utilitarianism." Justice is not directly linked to utility, and it's silly to suggest that justice has no role in the debate.
Isn't it? I'd say justice provides a lot of utility to a lot of people, in that knowing that justice will likely be done dissuades many potential miscreants to obey the law and thus lowers everyone's risk of falling victim to future crimes...
Here is a novel thought, why don't they not take my money and I can give it directly to the poor children. Why does the government need a cut?
Because, by and large, you won't. (well okay, you might, but most people wouldn't). Relying on individuals to be willing and able to appropriately address the country's national-level problems through voluntary donations of their own personal funds is simply unrealistic. The guaranteed result of adopting such a policy would be the effective destruction of the social safety net that many Americans rely on. And while you personally might find that acceptable, the vast majority of Americans do not.
. Palin's account got hacked into most likely because she had a weak, easily guessable password; these other guys don't necessarily.
Not to mention that she was accessing her email via a public web site, quite possibly sending her password across the Internet in cleartext every time she logged in. I doubt any of the other candidates mentioned do that. (and McCain's email in particular will be quite difficult to hack into;^))
It's not like the user is opening 100 tabs per second.
One (possible) exception to the above rule would be if the user is restoring a saved session. e.g. with 100 tabs open, you quit your web browser, and the next time you run the web browser it restores itself to the state it was in when you quit. In that case, 100 tabs would be opened more-or-less simultaneously, and any delays would become quite noticeable.
If we build wind mills by the tens of thousands it's going to cost lives.
On the other hand, if we stick with fossil fuels for the forseeable future, that will also cost lives. If we build nuclear plants, that too will cost lives. In fact, no matter what we do, there will be accidents and sometimes people will die in those accidents. That's life.
At least they are honest and actually answer questions and don't try to play the people.
Which is of course another way of saying "they aren't running for President". Anyone who is seriously trying to win an election is of course going to spin what they say to maximize the number of votes they get. Even the ever-popular "I'm a straight talker who never spins" spin is still just that... a spin, calculated to appeal to voters.
It's silly to go to a mud-wrestling match and then criticize the wrestlers for getting muddy.
Make fun of the old guy who wanted to guarantee individual net access just because he didn't know enough of the lingo to properly get his point across. (Yes, I realize that he came to the wrong conclusion policy wise to accomplish what he was saying he wanted to accomplish)
Let me point out that he isn't just "an old guy". He is a high-level professional who is supposed to be competently representing his state. If he isn't competent to do so, he shouldn't be in a position of responsibility.
I'll save my sympathy for the harmless geezers at the rest home; the ethically compromised incompetents in the government don't deserve it.
Solar is NOT a way to save money and every sucker who is drawn in by this idea will be turned off solar for a long time.
Depends on the future cost of utility-supplied electricity though, doesn't it? Buying solar panels for your roof is like buying a futures contract on electricity: in return for your money, you are (more or less) guaranteed a certain amount of electricity for a certain amount of time at a certain price. Whether or not you 'save money' depends on what the alternative price will be over that period. If you thought that electric rates were going to go up significantly in the near future, then solar panels might be a nice hedge against that.
hahahahaha, oh man you can't be serious. We all know how effective the government has been at all of those things....
Well, hasn't it? The Roads, Libraries, and Utilities seem to be working just fine under government regulation, at least here in California. Schools are uneven -- some are very good (e.g. most public colleges and universities, and some elementary schools and high schools). Health Care is lousy, but it's the privatized portion that's lousy. The public portion (Medicare, etc) works as advertised.
I think some people are so deep into their cynicism about governmental incompetence that they rarely stop to check if their cynicism is borne out by the facts...
Well a house in Calif* with a clear view of the sky & enough room for 27 solar panels is about $2 million. So it's a choice between saving $250 on electricity or saving $2 million on housing
California is a big place, and housing prices vary greatly. If you don't mind living out in the sticks, you can buy a house with plenty of land and sky for much less than $2 million.
And of course there are many people who already own a suitable house, or would have bought such a house anyway for other reasons.
It takes a lot of time / effort to politically push an increase through the system and they aren't about to go through that effort to decrease it. There is no incentive for that and every incentive to keep prices high.
In some cases you are correct... in other cases, the customer may have a choice to not purchase the overpriced power (either by switching to a competing electric service, or by producing his own power) -- in those cases, that would be an incentive for power companies to limit their prices, to avoid losing customers. In the cases where customers have no choice, it's usually because the local power company has been granted a monopoly by the government, in which case their prices are regulated anyway -- it's not up to the power company how much they charge.
The stuff that really causes headaches isn't bad style, it's general insanity. Hardcoded constants and poorly thought out ad-hoc parsers and general brain damage causes a million times more problems than just about anything anyone can describe in a standard.
I have to agree with this.... there are many more or less acceptable programming styles out there, and a reasonably experienced programmer can grok most of them with a few minutes of effort. What really counts is what the code does and how the code does it, not so much whether the curly braces are in one spot or another.
Hell, I defy anyone to show where any of this renewable powerplant technology has had the effect of lowering the cost to end consumers.
Demand for coal, oil and natural gas has been rising steadily and by all accounts will continue to rise for the foreseeable future, as China, India, and other countries' economies develop. The supply of non-renewable energy sources is diminishing, by definition -- if it was possible to make more of them, they wouldn't be called "non-renewable". Therefore you can pretty much guarantee that the cost of non-renewable energy will continue to rise in the future. Renewable power, on the other hand, will decrease in cost as the technology and economies of scale improve. A wind farm in operation today will cost no more to operate ten years from now, because its 'fuel', the wind, remains free.
So the obvious conclusion is, renewable power will save you lots of money in the long run.
Here's the first sentence of Bosnian War article on Wikipedia: "The War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, commonly known as the Bosnian War, was an international armed conflict that took place between March 1992 and November 1995."
I think that for all serious intents and purposes, Bosnia is over. We could quibble about definitions, but I'd prefer not to.
And you didn't look very hard.
My apologies, the NATO death toll was nine instead of two. I think my point stands, however... our casualties in Bosnia were nowhere near the 4000+ in Iraq.
And now you sidestep Kerry. I'd be willing to place a friendly wager that you, despite your vociferous objections to Iraq, voted for someone who approved it in the last presidential race.
You'd win your wager -- I did vote for Kerry, despite his authorization of the Iraq War, because I really wanted Bush out of office ASAP and a Kerry win was the only reasonably likely way to accomplish that. Before that I was a volunteer and a strong supporter of Howard Dean in the primaries, but as you know Dean didn't win the primary, so my choices were narrowed to Bush, Kerry, or (vote for someone else who clearly has no chance of winning, and sacrifice my ability to affect the election result at all). I voted in the way that I thought would maximize the likelihood of bringing about the best outcome.
How does that not signal them to keep doing what they're doing?
The thing is, voting isn't really about "sending signals". If I want to "send a signal", there are many easier and more productive ways to do that... talking of writing to the politician(s), for example. Voting is about deciding who will run the government, and if you are going to take that seriously, you have to be realistic about what your choices are. Nothing at this point is going to cause the Democratic party to be abandoned en masse by the electorate in favor of a third party; even the Republicans are unlikely to suffer that fate, despite their abysmal performance lately. Therefore at this point voting third party would merely be cutting off my nose to spite my face.
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There's really nothing wrong with programming on a current iMac. Anodized aluminum, so people won't laugh at you.... No more embarrassing colors copied straight off a queer-pride flag
Yes indeedy. As a Serious Applications Developer, the first and only criterion I have for selecting a development box is the color of its case, and in particular whether or not people will laugh at it.
The truth is that the further you dig into B.O.'s terrorist/criminal connections, the more you find. We've hardly scratched the surface. The PLO, Hamas, Arab American Action Network, Black Panthers, Weather Underground, ACORN, Nation of Islam, CAIR, ... This guy doesn't seem to have any connections that ARE clean!
Do you have any idea how paranoid you sound? Here's a clue: if EVERY piece of evidence you find points in the direction of your pre-supposed conclusion, you're probably misreading the evidence (or, more likely, someone else has misread it for you, as part of a failed smear campaign).
HER JOB is Governor of Alaska, not watchdog of the Supreme Court.
Actually, the job she is applying for is Vice President of the United States. Given that that is a fairly important job, I would expect her to have the requisite knowledge to do it, or I wouldn't hire her.
If there's really any "flaw" to the concept of having totally unregulated free markets, it's probably that it's a concept thought of by intelligent "long term" thinkers.
I'd say the "flaw" is in deciding just what "unregulated" means. In the extreme case, an unregulated market would allow anyone to do literally anything... including, say, kidnapping your competitor's CEO and holding him for ransom. Clearly that's not acceptable, so there has to be SOME regulation. So now you have to figure out where to draw the line. But where? Is racial discrimination in making loan decisions acceptable? Is the use of Microsoft-style monopoly tactics to squeeze out your competition considered okay, or not? Why? Etc. And pretty soon, you're back to our current system again, with a muddle of regulations, some effective, some not.
Free markets sound good in theory, but in real life they quickly degenerate back into what we have now. If the government doesn't regulate, then the most aggressive (and most powerful) private entities will step in and make their own "regulations" (enforced by their economic power), the difference being that their regulations will not be arrived at through any sort of democratic process, and will inevitably server their own interests alone.
And if you're honest, [Bush] doesn't pull Scientific frauds.
Have you been reading the news at all the last eight years? Every time the EPA came out with a study that indicated global warming, the Bush administration would rewrite and/or suppress the report. If that's not fraud, I don't know what is.
Fission very well could be, but half-vast fission we've been saddled with as a result of the Carter administration's (the one president who should've known better, btw, what with his degree in nuclear engineering) machinations.
Perhaps President Carter (with his degree in nuclear engineering) had some insight into the risks involved? Perhaps he made the right decision, or at least the right decision at the time.
The debates are a farce. The U.S. political system is a farce. Dems? Farce. GOP? Farce.
The answer is clear. Of our two current choices, none are good. We must find another choice.
When Nader speaks, I hear him telling the truth, at least as he sees it. That makes him the only candidate worth of election.
The idea that the electorate of the US (1/3rd of whom are Obama fans, 1/3rd of whom are McCain fans, and 1/3rd of whom are clueless) is going to wake up some time in the next 40 days and decide to coalesce around Ralph Nader? Farce.
Seriously, as much as you may like Ralph Nader, it just isn't going to happen in 2008. That ship has sailed.
Why are we stuck with choosing between two candidates that both want to increase the scope and cost of the federal government?
As for why you are struck choosing between just two candidates: that's how a winner-take-all electoral system works. If you want more than two viable candidates in an election, you'll need to convince the country to use a more robust electoral system.
As for why both of them want to increase the scope and cost of the federal government: it's likely that promising people more and better government services is a winning political strategy. (whether it's also a viable way to run the country, I leave as an exercise for the reader)
My religion teaches, and I believe, that every man should be free to believe and worship according to their own conscience. Naturally, I support the second amendment to the Constitution. There are those who want to restrict the worship of others, in violation of the free exercise clause.
Joe Biden? Is that you?
Oh, and this must mean that the Chinese have figured out a way to shove a 32-bit value into a 16-bit port number?
Yup! The key was to shrink each bit down to half its normal size...
That's only true if you define "reason" as "utilitarianism." Justice is not directly linked to utility, and it's silly to suggest that justice has no role in the debate.
Isn't it? I'd say justice provides a lot of utility to a lot of people, in that knowing that justice will likely be done dissuades many potential miscreants to obey the law and thus lowers everyone's risk of falling victim to future crimes...
Here is a novel thought, why don't they not take my money and I can give it directly to the poor children. Why does the government need a cut?
Because, by and large, you won't. (well okay, you might, but most people wouldn't). Relying on individuals to be willing and able to appropriately address the country's national-level problems through voluntary donations of their own personal funds is simply unrealistic. The guaranteed result of adopting such a policy would be the effective destruction of the social safety net that many Americans rely on. And while you personally might find that acceptable, the vast majority of Americans do not.
. Palin's account got hacked into most likely because she had a weak, easily guessable password; these other guys don't necessarily.
Not to mention that she was accessing her email via a public web site, quite possibly sending her password across the Internet in cleartext every time she logged in. I doubt any of the other candidates mentioned do that. (and McCain's email in particular will be quite difficult to hack into ;^))
It's not like the user is opening 100 tabs per second.
One (possible) exception to the above rule would be if the user is restoring a saved session. e.g. with 100 tabs open, you quit your web browser, and the next time you run the web browser it restores itself to the state it was in when you quit. In that case, 100 tabs would be opened more-or-less simultaneously, and any delays would become quite noticeable.
If we build wind mills by the tens of thousands it's going to cost lives.
On the other hand, if we stick with fossil fuels for the forseeable future, that will also cost lives. If we build nuclear plants, that too will cost lives. In fact, no matter what we do, there will be accidents and sometimes people will die in those accidents. That's life.
At least they are honest and actually answer questions and don't try to play the people.
Which is of course another way of saying "they aren't running for President". Anyone who is seriously trying to win an election is of course going to spin what they say to maximize the number of votes they get. Even the ever-popular "I'm a straight talker who never spins" spin is still just that... a spin, calculated to appeal to voters.
It's silly to go to a mud-wrestling match and then criticize the wrestlers for getting muddy.
Make fun of the old guy who wanted to guarantee individual net access just because he didn't know enough of the lingo to properly get his point across. (Yes, I realize that he came to the wrong conclusion policy wise to accomplish what he was saying he wanted to accomplish)
Let me point out that he isn't just "an old guy". He is a high-level professional who is supposed to be competently representing his state. If he isn't competent to do so, he shouldn't be in a position of responsibility.
I'll save my sympathy for the harmless geezers at the rest home; the ethically compromised incompetents in the government don't deserve it.
Too bad the chinese haven't figured out how to cheapen it up like everything else they've touched.
They're working on it... give them a few more years. They'd probably have it done already if they weren't so distracted by that Olympics thing. ;^)
Solar is NOT a way to save money and every sucker who is drawn in by this idea will be turned off solar for a long time.
Depends on the future cost of utility-supplied electricity though, doesn't it? Buying solar panels for your roof is like buying a futures contract on electricity: in return for your money, you are (more or less) guaranteed a certain amount of electricity for a certain amount of time at a certain price. Whether or not you 'save money' depends on what the alternative price will be over that period. If you thought that electric rates were going to go up significantly in the near future, then solar panels might be a nice hedge against that.
hahahahaha, oh man you can't be serious. We all know how effective the government has been at all of those things....
Well, hasn't it? The Roads, Libraries, and Utilities seem to be working just fine under government regulation, at least here in California. Schools are uneven -- some are very good (e.g. most public colleges and universities, and some elementary schools and high schools). Health Care is lousy, but it's the privatized portion that's lousy. The public portion (Medicare, etc) works as advertised.
I think some people are so deep into their cynicism about governmental incompetence that they rarely stop to check if their cynicism is borne out by the facts...
Well a house in Calif* with a clear view of the sky & enough room for 27 solar panels is about $2 million. So it's a choice between saving $250 on electricity or saving $2 million on housing
California is a big place, and housing prices vary greatly. If you don't mind living out in the sticks, you can buy a house with plenty of land and sky for much less than $2 million.
And of course there are many people who already own a suitable house, or would have bought such a house anyway for other reasons.
It takes a lot of time / effort to politically push an increase through the system and they aren't about to go through that effort to decrease it. There is no incentive for that and every incentive to keep prices high.
In some cases you are correct... in other cases, the customer may have a choice to not purchase the overpriced power (either by switching to a competing electric service, or by producing his own power) -- in those cases, that would be an incentive for power companies to limit their prices, to avoid losing customers. In the cases where customers have no choice, it's usually because the local power company has been granted a monopoly by the government, in which case their prices are regulated anyway -- it's not up to the power company how much they charge.
The stuff that really causes headaches isn't bad style, it's general insanity. Hardcoded constants and poorly thought out ad-hoc parsers and general brain damage causes a million times more problems than just about anything anyone can describe in a standard.
I have to agree with this.... there are many more or less acceptable programming styles out there, and a reasonably experienced programmer can grok most of them with a few minutes of effort. What really counts is what the code does and how the code does it, not so much whether the curly braces are in one spot or another.
Hell, I defy anyone to show where any of this renewable powerplant technology has had the effect of lowering the cost to end consumers.
Demand for coal, oil and natural gas has been rising steadily and by all accounts will continue to rise for the foreseeable future, as China, India, and other countries' economies develop. The supply of non-renewable energy sources is diminishing, by definition -- if it was possible to make more of them, they wouldn't be called "non-renewable". Therefore you can pretty much guarantee that the cost of non-renewable energy will continue to rise in the future. Renewable power, on the other hand, will decrease in cost as the technology and economies of scale improve. A wind farm in operation today will cost no more to operate ten years from now, because its 'fuel', the wind, remains free.
So the obvious conclusion is, renewable power will save you lots of money in the long run.
As I said, Bosnia still isn't over.
Here's the first sentence of Bosnian War article on Wikipedia: "The War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, commonly known as the Bosnian War, was an international armed conflict that took place between March 1992 and November 1995."
I think that for all serious intents and purposes, Bosnia is over. We could quibble about definitions, but I'd prefer not to.
And you didn't look very hard.
My apologies, the NATO death toll was nine instead of two. I think my point stands, however... our casualties in Bosnia were nowhere near the 4000+ in Iraq.
And now you sidestep Kerry. I'd be willing to place a friendly wager that you, despite your vociferous objections to Iraq, voted for someone who approved it in the last presidential race.
You'd win your wager -- I did vote for Kerry, despite his authorization of the Iraq War, because I really wanted Bush out of office ASAP and a Kerry win was the only reasonably likely way to accomplish that. Before that I was a volunteer and a strong supporter of Howard Dean in the primaries, but as you know Dean didn't win the primary, so my choices were narrowed to Bush, Kerry, or (vote for someone else who clearly has no chance of winning, and sacrifice my ability to affect the election result at all). I voted in the way that I thought would maximize the likelihood of bringing about the best outcome.
How does that not signal them to keep doing what they're doing?
The thing is, voting isn't really about "sending signals". If I want to "send a signal", there are many easier and more productive ways to do that... talking of writing to the politician(s), for example. Voting is about deciding who will run the government, and if you are going to take that seriously, you have to be realistic about what your choices are. Nothing at this point is going to cause the Democratic party to be abandoned en masse by the electorate in favor of a third party; even the Republicans are unlikely to suffer that fate, despite their abysmal performance lately. Therefore at this point voting third party would merely be cutting off my nose to spite my face.
Have courage! Vote for someone with an idea!
I think Obama fits that description.
Cheers,
Jeremy