It uses Thread objects. Not quite the same thing. If Thread is no longer a public class, then the various bad idioms that the Thread API. encourages are no longer possible.
Lets face it for a lot of systems like that "If it isn't broke don't mess with it" is a good idea.
It's a good way to avoid breaking anything. But it's an expensive strategy. If you assume that the cost of doing a given amount of computation drops by 50% every 18 months (Moore's Law, sort of), then installing 20-year old computer designs wastes 92.5% of your procurement dollars. And that's assuming all the hardware costs are the same. They probably go up, since you're building computers out of parts that are no longer commodities.
Um... no. They're not supporting Threads for a start - which is pretty major.
A major improvement. It's now accepted on concurrency wonks (including, no especially, the ones at Sun and Google) that Threads is a disaster. Sun itself would much prefer that everybody switch to the new Concurrency classes, which are not only much more reliable, but a lot easier to use.
While I agree that google is not Mr. Friendly, I'd be surprised if this particular move is about lock-in.
It never is. Whenever somebody modifies standard technology to suit themselves, they get accused of trying to create lockin. That's what happened when Phil Katz decided he could redo the ARC format faster and smaller. That's what happened when Anders Hejlsberg decided he couldn't live with Java's limitations. Netscape and HTML. Microsoft and HTML, CP/M, x86....
Lockin does usually occur when people do things in a different way, and the different way ends up being the de facto standard. But that's not why they do them. They do them because developers just plain like to do things their own way.
In the case of Google's "white list" this doesn't even come close to being lockin, because any application that will run on Google's classes will run on "standard Java". Sun's problem is that the reverse isn't true. And I'm not sure that really matters. Unless I've missed something, the missing classes are all legacy cruft that should have been deleted from Java long ago.
So why haven't they been? Lack of will. One Java core engineer told me that Sun got in trouble when they even deprecated an API, never mind removing a whole class. People just don't want to fix up all their legacy code, and Sun was too anxious to monetize Java to stand up to them.
Google has more flexibility, since they don't need for their version of the Java platform to make money anytime soon.
Long, sanctimonious diatribes about the evils of military power is not "doing something about it." Only people who already agree with you are going to listen, and even they get tired of being lectured.
How quickly they forget! In 1961, when the Marshall was launched, almost all information technology involved gears. And gears should not be sneered at: precision mechanical engineering is one of humanity's greatest achievements. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without it.
Integrated circuitry didn't even exist until 1958. If somebody had a "computer" it was most likely the analog kind (digital computers being few and heartbreakingly expensive). An analog computer was usually something that modelled its calculations using electrical circuits, but gears were not unknown. And there were a lot of "computers" (in the broad, pre-von Neumann sense) that weren't called that had some kind of mechanical basis: thermostats, accounting machines, etc.
This was really sophisticated technology. If you're used to a world where even cheap toys use tiny computers, it may seem klunky, but that's an illusion. In some ways, digital technology is often less sophisticated. When you have millions of transistors to throw at a problem, you're not nearly as careful with the solution.
One last historical note: the submariners of WW II wiped out a good chunk of the world's merchant marine using these "primitive" computers.
Don't lecture me on how the armed forces have been misused. I'm painfully aware of that. But we're going to have a huge military for some time to come. There are both good and bad reasons for that. (Let me at the DoD budget with a red pencil and about half of it would go away.) But whatever the reasons, the unavoidable fact is that it's there. Refusing to have anything to do with it is just sticking your head in the sand.
A little Googling tells me that the 637/Sturgeon-class subs were all built during the late 60s and early 70s. Core memory was still pretty big then. I was learning to program on IBM-360s with core memory. Though minicomputers with LSI memory were beginning to appears. Cheaper but slower.
Apparently the UYK-7 got phased out in favor of the UYK-43 (with solid-state RAM? can't find specifics) around 1984. This in turn is only now being replaced by the UYQ-70. So I guess the product cycle for naval warfare computers is about 20 years. Is that how long it takes the Pentagon to change specs?
A lot of UYK-7s must have got installed on 688/Los Angeles-class subs before 1984. Most 688 subs are still in service. I wonder if any of them still have UYK-7s?
OK, first of all, the bit about tech writers was a joke.
Second, speaking as an old leftie, I think one of our biggest mistakes was to marginalize the armed forces. Their misuse is a political problem and should be dealt with as such. Kicking ROTC off-campus and harassing recruiters only serves to make the military hierarchy more right-wing and to raise up a generation of people who don't know anything about military affairs.
I'm not even going to talk about all the idiots who blame vets for military blunders like Iraq which they deserve no blame for.
I once worked for a guy whose previous job had been to set up battlefield data centers for the Army. Smart guy, but his management style wasn't that effective with our more prima-donna-type software engineers. Perhaps if he'd had the authority to send them to the stockade...
I never thought to ask him what kind of applications you run on battlefield servers. For that matter, what kind of code do you write on a battlefield?
Hmm, in this economy, I need to keep my options open. Does the Army need tech writers? Never mind, I'd never pass the physical.
I am well versed enough on his policies to carry a lengthy conversation.
Anybody can do a "lengthy" conversation. I guess you meant to say "substantial". I'll believe you can do that when you start doing it.
How you think that the pen is not priceless, unique, and an irreplaceable piece of history is beyond me. It only takes a few moments of googling to discover that it's overrun with symbolism...
Don't patronize. Everybody who's heard about the pen knows its backstory symbolism. The fact remains that words like "priceless" and "historic" are hype. The HMS Resolute itself was a priceless historic artifact. Some important thing from the Resolute (the Captain's sextant perhaps) would also be a priceless historic artifact. But if you break up the Resolute, you don't have a PHA any more, you have a pile of lumber. If you make souvenirs out of that lumber, they may be full of interesting historical context, and they might make an appropriate gift for the first U.S. President of African heritage (though I do wonder if black people value souvenirs of the Middle Passage). But that's it.
...and is not a trivial gift.
Where did I say the gift was trivial? There are many gradations between "trivial" and "priceless". If I used the word, it was in reference to your arguments.
I refuse to elaborate this matter...
No, you just want to hit me over the head with it.
I expect every single bill that passes to be read and thoroughly understood.
Great. Next time you meet somebody who's running for office, tell them you won't vote for them unless they promise to carefully read every document they sign or vote for. Get back to me with a list of those that solidly endorse the idea. I suspect it won't be a long one.
If you're running 30 different services on 30 different machines, wouldn't it make as much sense to consolidate them to 15 services on each of two modern machines, instead of needing to maintain 30 different virtual machines?
I asked pretty much the same question when I started working with this hardware.
In many cases, you could put all 30 in one machine. The machine I described is advertised as supporting 80 virtual machines at once. (This number will go up drastically when the Istanbul/Hypertransport 3 version is available.) If it can support 80 VMs, it can certainly support 30 services!
Thing is, IT people don't like to put 30 services on one system. They don't even like to put 2. When a system goes down, they don't want more than one service to go down with it. Hence the huge market for 1U machines that mostly end up running a single service.
If you're running a half dozen services, spending a few extra K to put each service on a separate server is a no-brainer — you can easily lose that much if, say, a database server goes down and takes your email, web server, etc., with it. But when your IT needs start getting big, that adds up. Which is why VMware is a multi-billion-dollar company.
I hate those documents, where someone rambles on for 10 pages, about things like "to move your mouse, put your hand on the mouse... you know, that thing on the side of your keyboard. you have to push it. then look at the flat surface in front of you. do you see that little arrow on it. no not that on the right border. that is the scroll bar..." and so on.
So do I. Unfortunately, the writing style you describe is all too common. I don't use it.
I mostly write for really for fairly technical users, so I can get away with assuming that my readers know how to use a mouse and interact with a GUI. But even if I couldn't, I have techniques for conveying the trivia to naive users without driving the advanced users insane.
It's not that hard to write newbie instructions in such a way that the advanced users can easily skip over it. You put in a separate part of the document and refer to it. (You usually want to to do this anyway; inserting the same text over and over in a technical document makes it hard to maintain.) If, for some reason, the trivia has to go inside a procedure, you write the procedure to that the main steps are in bold, then all the boring prose explaining those a given step follows in ordinary type. Advanced users just read the bold parts, but the other stuff is there if the newbies need it.
The point that apparently not a single writer of documentation (or software for that matter) gets, is that you can't write in one level of detail, for all users.
Absolutely. But note that different manuals have different target audiences. Figuring out the right level of detail for my target audience is an important part of my job. Also...
So you have to have a method to allow the user to increase and decrease the detail on the fly. Eg by allowing you to press "+" and "-" on a paragraph, and by internally using some kind of markup.
As a matter of fact, some help engines already have this feature. (Microsoft's does.) I've never seen it used effectively, though. If I wrote a lot of naive user docs, and if the deployment formats I have access to supported these feature, I'd probably give it a try. (We deploy PDFs and HTML with little or no active content, but both formats could support this feature.) In the end, though, I'd probably go back to the techniques I've just described.
Not to be a Luddite, but non-techwriters always overestimate the ability of technology to solve documentation problems. Technology certainly helps (if you can get the funding to deploy it and persuade your fellow writers to use it; this is an ongoing battle) but in the end there will always be a huge human element in good technical communication.
Do you mean you wouldn't run a production server as a VM image or you wouldn't run it using a VM image you did not create yourself?
The latter. Recall that TPP thought that VM appliances made installation how-tos obsolete. That was the idea I was pooh-poohing.
As it happens, I'm the documentation lead for a server for which virtualization is very important. A very common use case for this system is "consolidation": you take a rack full of low-end servers each handling a separate application, and convert them all into a single machine running each application in a separate VM. Savings in power and real-estate cost can be enormous. VMware support is a key feature (of course), but Sun is also pushing its own Xen-based solution.
Man pages are (or are meant to be) reference documentation. Reference docs are important, but yeah, so are procedural docs.
Thing is, they're really hard to write well. I earn an absurd amount of money because I'm good at writing them. Most developers are not. Even the ones who are good writers (a distinct minority) tend to be good at academic-style writing, where you assume a lot of sophistication on the part of your reader. Such writers have no patience for the nit-picky detail good procedural docs need.
(I once wrote software release notes which included an explanation of how to unzip an archive. The developers, who happened to be pretty brilliant computer scientists doing cutting-edge work, thought their audience was "smarter" than that and made me take it out. Wackiness ensued.)
If you want good procedural documentation, you have to put a lot of work into creating it. Most open source projects don't have the extra bandwidth, and even if they do, they don't have people with the right skill set. That boils down to fluency with language and and stubborn patience when describing boring details. Not a big skill set, but one very few people seem to have.
The pen was certainly more valuable than a pile of DVDs, but "priceless, unique, and irreplaceable part of history" is an exaggeration.
I think most people are just a little tired of the constant babble from Obama haters. Yeah, he has a certain capacity for social blunders (this business with the DVDs, remarks about Nancy Reagan and the Special Olympics) and yes, I'm less than happy with some of his policies. But all in all he's doing a decent job. Sloppy gift buying aside, that overseas trip went pretty well, with Obama deftly handling a near meltdown at the G20 and doing a lot to undo Bush's unilateral blundering all over Europe.
Mind you, I'm not saying you should shut up. I'd even say you have a responsibilty, as a dissenter, to be vocal about your dissent. That's how democracy works. But if you want to have a real effect, start talking about serious policies that you don't like. Things like DVDs and lipstick are trivial distractions; people are sick of hearing about them.
You mean it's not bad literature, in which the good guys always win. David may have killed Goliath, and gone on to become King of Israel, but he still came to a tragic end. The brave Open Source geeks who took on the establishment and were defeated in the end fits in fine with this tradition.
Bush-hating bloggers considered him a fascist. Hence the comparison to Hitler. Since Obama-hating bloggers consider him a socialist, Stalin would be more appropriate.
One little problem: most bloggers don't know enough history to know WTF Stalin was. They wouldn't know about Hitler either, if the Nazis hadn't so thoroughly established their brand as the acme of repressive government. Just goes to show how important marketing is.
I think Holden would agree with you on that. It's now being reported that he feels that the AP overstated his emphasis on technofixes, all of which he considers "problematic".
Problematic or not, it's probably going to happen. Once the symptoms of global warming become impossible to explain away (buy your arctic beachfront now, while the market is still depressed!) world leaders will be under tremendous pressure to Do Something. But people will still resist changing their polluting lifestyles, and even if they didn't, reducing greenhouse gasses would take decades to show any effect. So they'll sulfurize the stratosphere and hope nothing goes wrong.
It gets worse. Once we start deliberately fiddling with the planetary thermostat, you're going to have really nasty arguments over what the planet's average temperature should be. A given value might lengthen the growing seasons in one region and cause massive drought in another. People have gone to war over a lot less.
Brown presented Obama with a priceless, unique, and irreplaceable piece of the U.K.'s history.
Good grief. It was a pen. OK, it was made from historic ships timber. That makes it valuable to some collector I suppose, and the connection to African-American history showed more thought than a pile of DVDs (Region 1 DVDs, no less!). But don't exaggerate.
Slashdot Mirror
It uses Thread objects. Not quite the same thing. If Thread is no longer a public class, then the various bad idioms that the Thread API. encourages are no longer possible.
Lets face it for a lot of systems like that "If it isn't broke don't mess with it" is a good idea.
It's a good way to avoid breaking anything. But it's an expensive strategy. If you assume that the cost of doing a given amount of computation drops by 50% every 18 months (Moore's Law, sort of), then installing 20-year old computer designs wastes 92.5% of your procurement dollars. And that's assuming all the hardware costs are the same. They probably go up, since you're building computers out of parts that are no longer commodities.
Um... no. They're not supporting Threads for a start - which is pretty major.
A major improvement. It's now accepted on concurrency wonks (including, no especially, the ones at Sun and Google) that Threads is a disaster. Sun itself would much prefer that everybody switch to the new Concurrency classes, which are not only much more reliable, but a lot easier to use.
While I agree that google is not Mr. Friendly, I'd be surprised if this particular move is about lock-in.
It never is. Whenever somebody modifies standard technology to suit themselves, they get accused of trying to create lockin. That's what happened when Phil Katz decided he could redo the ARC format faster and smaller. That's what happened when Anders Hejlsberg decided he couldn't live with Java's limitations. Netscape and HTML. Microsoft and HTML, CP/M, x86....
Lockin does usually occur when people do things in a different way, and the different way ends up being the de facto standard. But that's not why they do them. They do them because developers just plain like to do things their own way.
In the case of Google's "white list" this doesn't even come close to being lockin, because any application that will run on Google's classes will run on "standard Java". Sun's problem is that the reverse isn't true. And I'm not sure that really matters. Unless I've missed something, the missing classes are all legacy cruft that should have been deleted from Java long ago.
So why haven't they been? Lack of will. One Java core engineer told me that Sun got in trouble when they even deprecated an API, never mind removing a whole class. People just don't want to fix up all their legacy code, and Sun was too anxious to monetize Java to stand up to them.
Google has more flexibility, since they don't need for their version of the Java platform to make money anytime soon.
Long, sanctimonious diatribes about the evils of military power is not "doing something about it." Only people who already agree with you are going to listen, and even they get tired of being lectured.
How quickly they forget! In 1961, when the Marshall was launched, almost all information technology involved gears. And gears should not be sneered at: precision mechanical engineering is one of humanity's greatest achievements. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without it.
Integrated circuitry didn't even exist until 1958. If somebody had a "computer" it was most likely the analog kind (digital computers being few and heartbreakingly expensive). An analog computer was usually something that modelled its calculations using electrical circuits, but gears were not unknown. And there were a lot of "computers" (in the broad, pre-von Neumann sense) that weren't called that had some kind of mechanical basis: thermostats, accounting machines, etc.
This was really sophisticated technology. If you're used to a world where even cheap toys use tiny computers, it may seem klunky, but that's an illusion. In some ways, digital technology is often less sophisticated. When you have millions of transistors to throw at a problem, you're not nearly as careful with the solution.
One last historical note: the submariners of WW II wiped out a good chunk of the world's merchant marine using these "primitive" computers.
Don't lecture me on how the armed forces have been misused. I'm painfully aware of that. But we're going to have a huge military for some time to come. There are both good and bad reasons for that. (Let me at the DoD budget with a red pencil and about half of it would go away.) But whatever the reasons, the unavoidable fact is that it's there. Refusing to have anything to do with it is just sticking your head in the sand.
Thanks for an interesting bit of history.
A little Googling tells me that the 637/Sturgeon-class subs were all built during the late 60s and early 70s. Core memory was still pretty big then. I was learning to program on IBM-360s with core memory. Though minicomputers with LSI memory were beginning to appears. Cheaper but slower.
Apparently the UYK-7 got phased out in favor of the UYK-43 (with solid-state RAM? can't find specifics) around 1984. This in turn is only now being replaced by the UYQ-70. So I guess the product cycle for naval warfare computers is about 20 years. Is that how long it takes the Pentagon to change specs?
A lot of UYK-7s must have got installed on 688/Los Angeles-class subs before 1984. Most 688 subs are still in service. I wonder if any of them still have UYK-7s?
OK, first of all, the bit about tech writers was a joke.
Second, speaking as an old leftie, I think one of our biggest mistakes was to marginalize the armed forces. Their misuse is a political problem and should be dealt with as such. Kicking ROTC off-campus and harassing recruiters only serves to make the military hierarchy more right-wing and to raise up a generation of people who don't know anything about military affairs.
I'm not even going to talk about all the idiots who blame vets for military blunders like Iraq which they deserve no blame for.
The use Exchange on the battlefield? Suddenly, I feel a whole lot less safe.
I once worked for a guy whose previous job had been to set up battlefield data centers for the Army. Smart guy, but his management style wasn't that effective with our more prima-donna-type software engineers. Perhaps if he'd had the authority to send them to the stockade...
I never thought to ask him what kind of applications you run on battlefield servers. For that matter, what kind of code do you write on a battlefield?
Hmm, in this economy, I need to keep my options open. Does the Army need tech writers? Never mind, I'd never pass the physical.
I am well versed enough on his policies to carry a lengthy conversation.
Anybody can do a "lengthy" conversation. I guess you meant to say "substantial". I'll believe you can do that when you start doing it.
How you think that the pen is not priceless, unique, and an irreplaceable piece of history is beyond me. It only takes a few moments of googling to discover that it's overrun with symbolism...
Don't patronize. Everybody who's heard about the pen knows its backstory symbolism. The fact remains that words like "priceless" and "historic" are hype. The HMS Resolute itself was a priceless historic artifact. Some important thing from the Resolute (the Captain's sextant perhaps) would also be a priceless historic artifact. But if you break up the Resolute, you don't have a PHA any more, you have a pile of lumber. If you make souvenirs out of that lumber, they may be full of interesting historical context, and they might make an appropriate gift for the first U.S. President of African heritage (though I do wonder if black people value souvenirs of the Middle Passage). But that's it.
...and is not a trivial gift.
Where did I say the gift was trivial? There are many gradations between "trivial" and "priceless". If I used the word, it was in reference to your arguments.
I refuse to elaborate this matter...
No, you just want to hit me over the head with it.
I expect every single bill that passes to be read and thoroughly understood.
Great. Next time you meet somebody who's running for office, tell them you won't vote for them unless they promise to carefully read every document they sign or vote for. Get back to me with a list of those that solidly endorse the idea. I suspect it won't be a long one.
If you're running 30 different services on 30 different machines, wouldn't it make as much sense to consolidate them to 15 services on each of two modern machines, instead of needing to maintain 30 different virtual machines?
I asked pretty much the same question when I started working with this hardware.
In many cases, you could put all 30 in one machine. The machine I described is advertised as supporting 80 virtual machines at once. (This number will go up drastically when the Istanbul/Hypertransport 3 version is available.) If it can support 80 VMs, it can certainly support 30 services!
Thing is, IT people don't like to put 30 services on one system. They don't even like to put 2. When a system goes down, they don't want more than one service to go down with it. Hence the huge market for 1U machines that mostly end up running a single service.
If you're running a half dozen services, spending a few extra K to put each service on a separate server is a no-brainer — you can easily lose that much if, say, a database server goes down and takes your email, web server, etc., with it. But when your IT needs start getting big, that adds up. Which is why VMware is a multi-billion-dollar company.
I hate those documents, where someone rambles on for 10 pages, about things like "to move your mouse, put your hand on the mouse... you know, that thing on the side of your keyboard. you have to push it. then look at the flat surface in front of you. do you see that little arrow on it. no not that on the right border. that is the scroll bar..." and so on.
So do I. Unfortunately, the writing style you describe is all too common. I don't use it.
I mostly write for really for fairly technical users, so I can get away with assuming that my readers know how to use a mouse and interact with a GUI. But even if I couldn't, I have techniques for conveying the trivia to naive users without driving the advanced users insane.
It's not that hard to write newbie instructions in such a way that the advanced users can easily skip over it. You put in a separate part of the document and refer to it. (You usually want to to do this anyway; inserting the same text over and over in a technical document makes it hard to maintain.) If, for some reason, the trivia has to go inside a procedure, you write the procedure to that the main steps are in bold, then all the boring prose explaining those a given step follows in ordinary type. Advanced users just read the bold parts, but the other stuff is there if the newbies need it.
The point that apparently not a single writer of documentation (or software for that matter) gets, is that you can't write in one level of detail, for all users.
Absolutely. But note that different manuals have different target audiences. Figuring out the right level of detail for my target audience is an important part of my job. Also...
So you have to have a method to allow the user to increase and decrease the detail on the fly. Eg by allowing you to press "+" and "-" on a paragraph, and by internally using some kind of markup.
As a matter of fact, some help engines already have this feature. (Microsoft's does.) I've never seen it used effectively, though. If I wrote a lot of naive user docs, and if the deployment formats I have access to supported these feature, I'd probably give it a try. (We deploy PDFs and HTML with little or no active content, but both formats could support this feature.) In the end, though, I'd probably go back to the techniques I've just described.
Not to be a Luddite, but non-techwriters always overestimate the ability of technology to solve documentation problems. Technology certainly helps (if you can get the funding to deploy it and persuade your fellow writers to use it; this is an ongoing battle) but in the end there will always be a huge human element in good technical communication.
Do you mean you wouldn't run a production server as a VM image or you wouldn't run it using a VM image you did not create yourself?
The latter. Recall that TPP thought that VM appliances made installation how-tos obsolete. That was the idea I was pooh-poohing.
As it happens, I'm the documentation lead for a server for which virtualization is very important. A very common use case for this system is "consolidation": you take a rack full of low-end servers each handling a separate application, and convert them all into a single machine running each application in a separate VM. Savings in power and real-estate cost can be enormous. VMware support is a key feature (of course), but Sun is also pushing its own Xen-based solution.
That's fine for a demo. I wouldn't want to run a chat server with hundreds of users that way.
Man pages are (or are meant to be) reference documentation. Reference docs are important, but yeah, so are procedural docs.
Thing is, they're really hard to write well. I earn an absurd amount of money because I'm good at writing them. Most developers are not. Even the ones who are good writers (a distinct minority) tend to be good at academic-style writing, where you assume a lot of sophistication on the part of your reader. Such writers have no patience for the nit-picky detail good procedural docs need.
(I once wrote software release notes which included an explanation of how to unzip an archive. The developers, who happened to be pretty brilliant computer scientists doing cutting-edge work, thought their audience was "smarter" than that and made me take it out. Wackiness ensued.)
If you want good procedural documentation, you have to put a lot of work into creating it. Most open source projects don't have the extra bandwidth, and even if they do, they don't have people with the right skill set. That boils down to fluency with language and and stubborn patience when describing boring details. Not a big skill set, but one very few people seem to have.
The pen was certainly more valuable than a pile of DVDs, but "priceless, unique, and irreplaceable part of history" is an exaggeration.
I think most people are just a little tired of the constant babble from Obama haters. Yeah, he has a certain capacity for social blunders (this business with the DVDs, remarks about Nancy Reagan and the Special Olympics) and yes, I'm less than happy with some of his policies. But all in all he's doing a decent job. Sloppy gift buying aside, that overseas trip went pretty well, with Obama deftly handling a near meltdown at the G20 and doing a lot to undo Bush's unilateral blundering all over Europe.
Mind you, I'm not saying you should shut up. I'd even say you have a responsibilty, as a dissenter, to be vocal about your dissent. That's how democracy works. But if you want to have a real effect, start talking about serious policies that you don't like. Things like DVDs and lipstick are trivial distractions; people are sick of hearing about them.
You mean it's not bad literature, in which the good guys always win. David may have killed Goliath, and gone on to become King of Israel, but he still came to a tragic end. The brave Open Source geeks who took on the establishment and were defeated in the end fits in fine with this tradition.
Amiga
BeOS
WordPerfect
A certain Norwegian Blue Parrot
Glad to hear this, because the FreeRunner is an interesting phone.
"Interesting" in what way? Beyond the obvious fact that it's hackable. Or have "interesting" and "hackable" become synonyms?
Someone's invading Santa Cruz? A little late for that!
Bush-hating bloggers considered him a fascist. Hence the comparison to Hitler. Since Obama-hating bloggers consider him a socialist, Stalin would be more appropriate.
One little problem: most bloggers don't know enough history to know WTF Stalin was. They wouldn't know about Hitler either, if the Nazis hadn't so thoroughly established their brand as the acme of repressive government. Just goes to show how important marketing is.
I think Holden would agree with you on that. It's now being reported that he feels that the AP overstated his emphasis on technofixes, all of which he considers "problematic".
Problematic or not, it's probably going to happen. Once the symptoms of global warming become impossible to explain away (buy your arctic beachfront now, while the market is still depressed!) world leaders will be under tremendous pressure to Do Something. But people will still resist changing their polluting lifestyles, and even if they didn't, reducing greenhouse gasses would take decades to show any effect. So they'll sulfurize the stratosphere and hope nothing goes wrong.
It gets worse. Once we start deliberately fiddling with the planetary thermostat, you're going to have really nasty arguments over what the planet's average temperature should be. A given value might lengthen the growing seasons in one region and cause massive drought in another. People have gone to war over a lot less.
Gonna be a fun century.
Brown presented Obama with a priceless, unique, and irreplaceable piece of the U.K.'s history.
Good grief. It was a pen. OK, it was made from historic ships timber. That makes it valuable to some collector I suppose, and the connection to African-American history showed more thought than a pile of DVDs (Region 1 DVDs, no less!). But don't exaggerate.