The fact is that people knew Bush's opinion before they voted for him. So therefore, they support the ban in the only poll that counts.
I sincerely doubt that most of the electorate knew Bush's stance on stem cell research, let alone the more subtle elements, such as where the embryos come form. I will concede that if they did, they likely wouldn't have cared. The electorate in America does not make fact based decisions. In fairness, the same can be said of other nations, it's just more starkly evident in the States.
As for your example of climate change, I think this is a better counter-point. This is exactly the kind of issue where science should be informing the citizenry, and it must be injected into the political debate as it requires a political solution. Al Gore did a tremendous service because he brought it to the forefront when it had previously been relegated to a political backwater. Depending on which side you come down on, you will think that either the left or the right has politicized it. This demonstrates very clearly that science has very little influence in American politics.
Science should not be the only metric on which political decisions are made, but the two examples you cite are perfect examples of how science has been driven completely out of the discussion.
I wholeheartedly agree that the way the debate has been framed is appalling, but it is not because the policies of one side or the other are supported by science. It is appalling because when one side finds the science inconvenient, the cry for a "fair and balanced" debate goes up, and science is neither. It is rather notable for it's lack of giving all sides an equal voice, requiring evidence to back a point be demonstrated before it is given any standing.
Science can not trump politics, but neither can it be the child at the table that should be seen and not heard.
Science should inform politics, but should not be the only tool used to set policy. It is perhaps most important in providing a basis for debate. It is unfortunate that certain groups have been quite successful in framing this as tantamount to rule by an immoral technocratic elite. It is the debate that makes them uncomfortable. They would instead prefer the comfort of autocratic rule. At least until those rulers disagree with them.
And I appreciate your use of the word "ethics" rather than "morality";)
"...but will science stay out of politics?"
I certainly hope not. Politics is about how we as a society decide to govern ourselves, and the process we have to come to consensus. A democratic system functions best when the electorate is well informed and educated enough to weigh the options. Science is about understanding the world around us, about gathering and attempting to interpret as much information as possible. In a very real sense, science can be seen as the basis of a healthy democracy.
There is a reason that monarchies are supported by the concept of divine right. There is little room for questions in a monarchy, and little need for the citizenry to be educated and informed. They simply need to accept that the ruler is right. A democracy requires that you convince them, hopefully with a well reasoned, fact based argument. Science facilitates this.
Everyone's posting this, but you've got the current high-score;)
I've used Multiple IE, and it mostly works, but I've run into a few issues. One is the recent forced-upgrade to Vista, which Multiple IE doesn't run on (yet), so I can't use it on my main dev box. I still have an XP machine around, but I've come across some weird issues there as well. One has either something to do with cookies or forwarding, which makes even logging in to some online apps impossible. Testing against IE6 on a virtual image of XP there's no such problem. Cost me a morning of headaches yesterday, though, before I gave up trying to fix it and re-installed the image from MS (stupid time limited image.)
I applaud TredoSoft for the effort, but those edge cases can be a bitch.
My bread and butter is also PHP, and I would never recommend it as a teaching language for all the reasons you mentioned. One thing that was implicit in your post, but I think is worth noting, is that the large quantity of class-A screwups rampant in PHP libraries and applications are another strike against it as a first language. The first language I got serious about was perl, and love it or hate it, there is a community there that's very quality oriented. (Yes, you need to dig through the usual chaff.) One thing that was critical to my learning was being able to read large quantities of well written, well documented code.
The background I gained from other languages made it possible for me to see PHP's flaws and work around them. I shudder to think what would have become of my programming practices if it was where I started.
(For the record, I also write almost all my own framework code for PHP as a result. Some of the more recent stuff that's come out might very well be decent, but a) the tolerance for terrible APIs that PHP itself engenders leaks into much of it, b) I've been bitten by PEAR one too many times, and c) out of necessity, I've written enough of the basics that I don't have a compelling need for them anymore. I sometimes question the NIHness of this, so it's nice to know I'm not the only one;)
I just finished reading 1421, and my completely-layman, don't-know-enough-history-to-comment opinion was that it was interesting (and, sure, possible), but the author seemed to play pretty fast and loose with his evidence. Some of his claims (like the idea that the Bimini Road was a construction to slide ships back into deeper water after repair) sounded pretty outlandish and not well researched. Others, such as his analysis of old maps and the routes ships would have taken, seemed plausible, but I don't have the background to evaluate them.
I've been looking for a good analysis of his claims, but haven't been able to find much beyond "he got detail X wrong, so it's all bogus." I'd like to read some better thought out critiques. If you have any links handy, I'd be much obliged.
One of the reasons Shuttleworth founded Canonical was to fund Ubuntu. He tossed enough cash at the Ubuntu Foundation ($USD10 million) to make sure it would be viable for a good long time. He's smart enough to want to make sure Ubuntu keeps being funded, so he made sure there would be a steady stream of income.
He also founded the Shuttleworth Foundation, which is focused on education. One of the things you need for that in this day and age is....computers. If you don't want your child's education to be held hostage by a for-profit corporation, one of the things you need is a free-as-in-speech operating system to run all your important education software on.
Does anyone seriously think setting up this particular chain is an accident? An education foundation that emphasizes the need for Free software, a user-friendly Linux distribution, and a revenue source?
I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but Shuttleworth comes off as some kind of Heinlein-esque hero.
Oh, yeah, that's pretty much what I was trying to get at (unless I misunderstand.) HTML and CSS and javascript and whatever server-side language you're using are all different beasts, and I personally prefer to meet each on their own terms. It might take a bigger learning investment, but the payoff is understanding everything that's going on, and being able to manipulate it at a fine grained level. And you can take advantage of the strengths inherent in each, while occasionally offsetting their weaknesses with one of the other tools in your kit.
I can see the appeal of staying in your own paradigm, and maybe there's even places where it's the right way to go. But I'm pretty sure that knowing each individually gives me better results faster. Might not be true for all.
Here's a funny thing - I go through the same questions, wondering if I'm holding on to old biases that have gone past their best-before date. Every couple years I'll take a look around to see if I'm missing something, and invariably come to the conclusion that things Aren't Quite There Yet. Then I'll go refactor some of my own light-weight libraries and move on. Which makes me wonder how subject I am to NIH syndrome. But I get things done.
The punch line is that I did cut my teeth on CGI (perl 4) and a hash map for dispatching requests, and now I'm almost completely OO. I don't think it's the only way to do things, but I'm more comfortable with it. I certainly like the freedom to drop into procedural or functional when I think it fits better, but my bias is definitely for objects. I try not to be a zealot about it. That just doesn't have any place in a field with pretty well defined parameters. I like to leave that for the theologians.
Of course, after committing many of my own sins of over (or just poor) engineering, I have a very low tolerance for it in third party stuff. I was recently working in something that had six levels of inheritance put together by someone who obviously didn't understand composition. I didn't sleep well a few nights.
Things like HTML generating classes just for the sake of staying in a comfortable paradigm boggle my mind. Like you said, ain't nuthin' wrong with text. I'd rather learn something new than shoehorn it into The One True Way (whichever way that happens to be.) I find there's a lot more flexibility and power in letting each technology be itself, and adapting to it, instead.
I don't imagine we've seen the last of this kind of thing by a long shot. I'm convinced, though, that sticking to fundamentals is what's helped me keep up on new technologies, and keep myself relevant. If everyone else is on a bandwagon, it just means it's quieter where I am.
(Liked the site linked in your sig, by the way. Good stuff.)
Re:Worse than Wicket?
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There is a benefit to simplicity and writing HTML in HTML and writing Javascript in Javascript that over-engineers who are, frankly, a little OO-obsessed just don't get.
I couldn't agree more. I like my code structured, clean and simple, and layering abstraction upon abstraction is not a good way to achieve that. I'm also a big proponent of writing to the language's strengths. JavaScript has some annoying weaknesses (lack of namespaces), but things like it's object prototyping are very powerful, and it seems silly to give that up. For all the browser inconsistencies, HTML + CSS is actually quite a nice layout tool. Getting them all to work together requires some organizational skills, but it pays off in ease of use and a higher level of control.
These are tools a web developer really should be comfortable with anyway, so while I can see the utility of something like GWT if you're not, to really excel at it, you should be knowledgeable about them.
Yes, but you are also sitting at the start point of the big bang. Every spot in the universe can make the same claim.
"Big bang" is a cool name for it, but it's a bit of a misnomer, as there wasn't anywhere for an actual explosion to occur when it happened. Thinking of the big bang as having a point of origin is a bit like asking "what's outside the universe?" Just as with Oakland, there's no there there.
I'd recommend Brian Green's The Elegeant Universe. It's focus is string theory, but to get there you have to go through relativity, the big bang theory and quantum mechanics, as they're all related. He's a gifted science writer and ties it all together in a very accessible way.
I agree that emoticons are typically a crutch for people who can't write. Unfortunately, there's an increasingly large number of supposedly literate people who can't read. In business communications, unless I know the person well, I try to keep things at an eight grade comprehension level. Much to my shame, I do also include the occasional emoticon, if the other party starts it first. They've established they're mode of comfortable communication, and I try to emulate that.
Screw it - "ginormous" is now in the dictionary. English is dead to me.
Johny: I'll be right down, Mom! I'm just mounting Bianca!
Seriously, though, I don't see there's a problem with the names. People I've introduced to Linux seem to find it kind of charming. The "businesses don't take these names seriously" argument is silly. Suits are people, too. And there _are_ version numbers if you need to sound all corporate.
Nope;) I remember that well. I remember watching Dee Snider from Twisted Sister put a panel of senators to shame by being the worst dressed and most articulate guy in the room.
Sometimes it amazes me how much political energy, air time and public opinion is wasted on things like saving the children from the evils of GTA or making sure they don't hear nasty words in music (have they been to a school yard lately?) There are a few more important issues to kick around. I strongly suspect a lot of it is just a grab for political capital.
We do have a few advantages up here - a strong difference between the right wing Conservatives and the lefty New Democratic Party for instance - but there's signs of sliding. Folks from the RIAA have been lobbying hard up here. For a while, they had a Liberal MP (Liberal == middle of the road, MP == congressman) with responsibility for copyright reforms in their pocket. Then she got outed, lost in the election, and they bought off a Conservative.
It's this kind of thing that makes me pay less attention to party affiliation these days, and more to the person I'm voting for. There are good people in politics, they're just damned hard to find sometimes. When we find one we can believe, I think it's important to support them.
The reasonable man adapts to the world. The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I've always loved that quote. It's sad that our leaders are so governed by opinion polls and focus groups. We had a prime minister for a while that led. Pierre Trudeau wasn't always necessarily popular, but he had a very clear idea what he thought the nation should look like. He didn't try to sneak it in - he never shied from telling people what he thought - but he was very clear that some things were just going to happen.
I wish I could find the quote, but when he was championing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, someone asked him about a section dealing with equal rights, I believe the bit about equal rights for homosexuals. His response was that some things are not a matter of opinion. (If anyone can give me the appropriate quote or context, I'd be grateful.) Today, it's difficult to imagine a politician not issuing some bland statement on the issue.
The question that remains unanswered is - what motivated these two watchdogs to partner with the video game industry on this initiative? Did the industry perhaps make concessions or give assurances?"
There's all kinds of shenanigans that go on with corporate donations to candidates, but I think there's an easier explanation for this. Sen. Clinton seems to be trying to woo the soft Republicans - I mean those middle-of-the-road, non-neo-con, socially conservative types. She can't do it on abortion issues, or gay marriage without angering her Democratic base, so she's picked an issue that's fairly neutral but has that nice "family values" feel to it. And it's video games, so it's not like she's giving up an important issue or anything.
Except, of course, that this ignores First Amendment implications. I mostly like Sen. Clinton and Lieberman (even if he is a bit wishy-washy, I don't think he's Evil), but if this is their motivation, it makes me wonder about either their ability to discern what important issues for the future actually are, or that this issue is an acceptable loss in the bid to win back the White House. Either one seems bad.
PS. I'm one of those pinko-Canadians, so for me American politics is mostly a grand spectator sport. Flame on!
I've been developing nearly exclusively in PHP for somewhere around four years (just so you know, I'm not slagging the language for the hell of it. I've stored up a good dose of pain.)
Why is PHP so terrible? Is it the rich API
It's the 3000+ functions in the global (and only) namespace. It's the inconsistant function naming ('2' or 'to', underscores or not) and parameters (needle-haystack or haystack-needle.) It's the poor quality of much of PEAR (not that there aren't some fine packages there, but they are not the majority)
universal support
The sole reason I use it. This shouldn't be underestimated.
good development tools
No better than any other environment, and not as good as many. You can do things like step through code and set breakpoints, but the pain involved in getting that set up is huge.
PHP's documentation is one of my big complaints. I don't want to disparage the huge community effort in it, but it just doesn't compare favorably to that available for other languages. Read through the comment threads on php.net, and you'll find mistakes, clumsy workarounds and just general Bad Ideas all over the place. The documentation itself is frequently obtuse (see sprintf for a fine example. A great deal of time is spent on using it for argument swapping, something I've never had to do this way in PHP. It's actual purpose is too quickly passed over for someone new to programming.)
Apparently none of these are enough to overcome the advantage of a large install base, but I am seriously looking at moving to a different language. It's just unfortunate I'll be leaving a lot of experience behind when I do.
Once PHP loses its ubiquity crown, it doesn't have much advantage left.
Yeah, not really. Ubiquity and knowing that certain things (like database connectivity) come with a standard install are the only reasons I use it. I'm dying to move to another language for development, but at the moment PHP is king of the hill in Free-land on those two counts.
I'm very hesitant to write PHP 5 code for anything that may have to be reused on another server
Not quite sure what you mean by this, unless you mean the lack of an install base out there. I've been fortunate enough to be able to switch entirely to PHP5, and going back to 4 would be extremely painful.
My current PHP gripe is the community itself - not to disparage the many fine folk in it, but among many there is a definite distrust (bordering on hostility) to good architecture. Browse through PEAR sometime to see what I mean. There are some good libraries there, but many of them are a huge PITA to shoe-horn into a decent architecture. There's a slow change working through it. People like Harry Fueks have been evangelizing things like patterns, and there seems to be some slow realization coming that there's more to putting together a decent web app than mixing random code into your HTML.
What makes me despair is that I find myself drawn into too many arguments about whether MVC is "worth it", why patterns aren't "over-architecting" and on and on. I know that there are good, professional PHP developers out there (I work with some, thank god), but this alone* is making me consider a jump to another language. If I can figure out which it should be.
* Not that I don't have other reasons as well, but one gripe at a time;) )
Remember, too, that we have about 1/10 the population of the states. If you're just looking at raw numbers, we'll never have a similar number of top universities as the US does. Or at least you'd better hope we never do;)
Re:slightly different paradigm
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Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
Y'know, foolishly enough, that never occurred to me. I'll blame the painkillers. I used to like emacs a lot, and probably still would if I switched back. Of course, I also like trying out new editors, so having a ready excuse didn't bother me too much./p>
I'll probably stick to the vim side of the fence unless some really compelling reason to switch comes up, if only to preserve my monstrous.vimrc;)
Re:slightly different paradigm
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
Except for capital letters I've never had to press two buttons at once, ever...
Which is why I switched from emacs. Ever tried coding in emacs with a broken wrist? It's hard enough with two functional hands.
Yep, that's the stuff. You know those annoyingly cute mouse-trailers that were all the rage a couple years ago? Same idea. Capturing the data is pretty easy. Making something meaningful out of all that data is something else.
Slashdot Mirror
I sincerely doubt that most of the electorate knew Bush's stance on stem cell research, let alone the more subtle elements, such as where the embryos come form. I will concede that if they did, they likely wouldn't have cared. The electorate in America does not make fact based decisions. In fairness, the same can be said of other nations, it's just more starkly evident in the States.
As for your example of climate change, I think this is a better counter-point. This is exactly the kind of issue where science should be informing the citizenry, and it must be injected into the political debate as it requires a political solution. Al Gore did a tremendous service because he brought it to the forefront when it had previously been relegated to a political backwater. Depending on which side you come down on, you will think that either the left or the right has politicized it. This demonstrates very clearly that science has very little influence in American politics.
Science should not be the only metric on which political decisions are made, but the two examples you cite are perfect examples of how science has been driven completely out of the discussion.
I wholeheartedly agree that the way the debate has been framed is appalling, but it is not because the policies of one side or the other are supported by science. It is appalling because when one side finds the science inconvenient, the cry for a "fair and balanced" debate goes up, and science is neither. It is rather notable for it's lack of giving all sides an equal voice, requiring evidence to back a point be demonstrated before it is given any standing.
Science can not trump politics, but neither can it be the child at the table that should be seen and not heard.
Science should inform politics, but should not be the only tool used to set policy. It is perhaps most important in providing a basis for debate. It is unfortunate that certain groups have been quite successful in framing this as tantamount to rule by an immoral technocratic elite. It is the debate that makes them uncomfortable. They would instead prefer the comfort of autocratic rule. At least until those rulers disagree with them.
And I appreciate your use of the word "ethics" rather than "morality" ;)
"...but will science stay out of politics?" I certainly hope not. Politics is about how we as a society decide to govern ourselves, and the process we have to come to consensus. A democratic system functions best when the electorate is well informed and educated enough to weigh the options. Science is about understanding the world around us, about gathering and attempting to interpret as much information as possible. In a very real sense, science can be seen as the basis of a healthy democracy. There is a reason that monarchies are supported by the concept of divine right. There is little room for questions in a monarchy, and little need for the citizenry to be educated and informed. They simply need to accept that the ruler is right. A democracy requires that you convince them, hopefully with a well reasoned, fact based argument. Science facilitates this.
Everyone's posting this, but you've got the current high-score ;)
I've used Multiple IE, and it mostly works, but I've run into a few issues. One is the recent forced-upgrade to Vista, which Multiple IE doesn't run on (yet), so I can't use it on my main dev box. I still have an XP machine around, but I've come across some weird issues there as well. One has either something to do with cookies or forwarding, which makes even logging in to some online apps impossible. Testing against IE6 on a virtual image of XP there's no such problem. Cost me a morning of headaches yesterday, though, before I gave up trying to fix it and re-installed the image from MS (stupid time limited image.)
I applaud TredoSoft for the effort, but those edge cases can be a bitch.
My bread and butter is also PHP, and I would never recommend it as a teaching language for all the reasons you mentioned. One thing that was implicit in your post, but I think is worth noting, is that the large quantity of class-A screwups rampant in PHP libraries and applications are another strike against it as a first language. The first language I got serious about was perl, and love it or hate it, there is a community there that's very quality oriented. (Yes, you need to dig through the usual chaff.) One thing that was critical to my learning was being able to read large quantities of well written, well documented code.
The background I gained from other languages made it possible for me to see PHP's flaws and work around them. I shudder to think what would have become of my programming practices if it was where I started.
(For the record, I also write almost all my own framework code for PHP as a result. Some of the more recent stuff that's come out might very well be decent, but a) the tolerance for terrible APIs that PHP itself engenders leaks into much of it, b) I've been bitten by PEAR one too many times, and c) out of necessity, I've written enough of the basics that I don't have a compelling need for them anymore. I sometimes question the NIHness of this, so it's nice to know I'm not the only one ;)
I just finished reading 1421, and my completely-layman, don't-know-enough-history-to-comment opinion was that it was interesting (and, sure, possible), but the author seemed to play pretty fast and loose with his evidence. Some of his claims (like the idea that the Bimini Road was a construction to slide ships back into deeper water after repair) sounded pretty outlandish and not well researched. Others, such as his analysis of old maps and the routes ships would have taken, seemed plausible, but I don't have the background to evaluate them.
I've been looking for a good analysis of his claims, but haven't been able to find much beyond "he got detail X wrong, so it's all bogus." I'd like to read some better thought out critiques. If you have any links handy, I'd be much obliged.
For god's sake.
One of the reasons Shuttleworth founded Canonical was to fund Ubuntu. He tossed enough cash at the Ubuntu Foundation ($USD10 million) to make sure it would be viable for a good long time. He's smart enough to want to make sure Ubuntu keeps being funded, so he made sure there would be a steady stream of income.
He also founded the Shuttleworth Foundation, which is focused on education. One of the things you need for that in this day and age is....computers. If you don't want your child's education to be held hostage by a for-profit corporation, one of the things you need is a free-as-in-speech operating system to run all your important education software on.
Does anyone seriously think setting up this particular chain is an accident? An education foundation that emphasizes the need for Free software, a user-friendly Linux distribution, and a revenue source?
I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but Shuttleworth comes off as some kind of Heinlein-esque hero.
Unless the GRB was 8000 years less an hour ago.
Oh, yeah, that's pretty much what I was trying to get at (unless I misunderstand.) HTML and CSS and javascript and whatever server-side language you're using are all different beasts, and I personally prefer to meet each on their own terms. It might take a bigger learning investment, but the payoff is understanding everything that's going on, and being able to manipulate it at a fine grained level. And you can take advantage of the strengths inherent in each, while occasionally offsetting their weaknesses with one of the other tools in your kit.
I can see the appeal of staying in your own paradigm, and maybe there's even places where it's the right way to go. But I'm pretty sure that knowing each individually gives me better results faster. Might not be true for all.
Here's a funny thing - I go through the same questions, wondering if I'm holding on to old biases that have gone past their best-before date. Every couple years I'll take a look around to see if I'm missing something, and invariably come to the conclusion that things Aren't Quite There Yet. Then I'll go refactor some of my own light-weight libraries and move on. Which makes me wonder how subject I am to NIH syndrome. But I get things done.
The punch line is that I did cut my teeth on CGI (perl 4) and a hash map for dispatching requests, and now I'm almost completely OO. I don't think it's the only way to do things, but I'm more comfortable with it. I certainly like the freedom to drop into procedural or functional when I think it fits better, but my bias is definitely for objects. I try not to be a zealot about it. That just doesn't have any place in a field with pretty well defined parameters. I like to leave that for the theologians.
Of course, after committing many of my own sins of over (or just poor) engineering, I have a very low tolerance for it in third party stuff. I was recently working in something that had six levels of inheritance put together by someone who obviously didn't understand composition. I didn't sleep well a few nights.
Things like HTML generating classes just for the sake of staying in a comfortable paradigm boggle my mind. Like you said, ain't nuthin' wrong with text. I'd rather learn something new than shoehorn it into The One True Way (whichever way that happens to be.) I find there's a lot more flexibility and power in letting each technology be itself, and adapting to it, instead.
I don't imagine we've seen the last of this kind of thing by a long shot. I'm convinced, though, that sticking to fundamentals is what's helped me keep up on new technologies, and keep myself relevant. If everyone else is on a bandwagon, it just means it's quieter where I am.
(Liked the site linked in your sig, by the way. Good stuff.)
I couldn't agree more. I like my code structured, clean and simple, and layering abstraction upon abstraction is not a good way to achieve that. I'm also a big proponent of writing to the language's strengths. JavaScript has some annoying weaknesses (lack of namespaces), but things like it's object prototyping are very powerful, and it seems silly to give that up. For all the browser inconsistencies, HTML + CSS is actually quite a nice layout tool. Getting them all to work together requires some organizational skills, but it pays off in ease of use and a higher level of control.
These are tools a web developer really should be comfortable with anyway, so while I can see the utility of something like GWT if you're not, to really excel at it, you should be knowledgeable about them.
Yes, but you are also sitting at the start point of the big bang. Every spot in the universe can make the same claim. "Big bang" is a cool name for it, but it's a bit of a misnomer, as there wasn't anywhere for an actual explosion to occur when it happened. Thinking of the big bang as having a point of origin is a bit like asking "what's outside the universe?" Just as with Oakland, there's no there there. I'd recommend Brian Green's The Elegeant Universe. It's focus is string theory, but to get there you have to go through relativity, the big bang theory and quantum mechanics, as they're all related. He's a gifted science writer and ties it all together in a very accessible way.
Damnit, I've apparently established my level of crappy grammar. Fire at will...
I agree that emoticons are typically a crutch for people who can't write. Unfortunately, there's an increasingly large number of supposedly literate people who can't read. In business communications, unless I know the person well, I try to keep things at an eight grade comprehension level. Much to my shame, I do also include the occasional emoticon, if the other party starts it first. They've established they're mode of comfortable communication, and I try to emulate that. Screw it - "ginormous" is now in the dictionary. English is dead to me.
Great...
Mom: Johny, what are you doing up there? Dinner!
Johny: I'll be right down, Mom! I'm just mounting Bianca!
Seriously, though, I don't see there's a problem with the names. People I've introduced to Linux seem to find it kind of charming. The "businesses don't take these names seriously" argument is silly. Suits are people, too. And there _are_ version numbers if you need to sound all corporate.
Personality is not a bad marketing tool.
Nope ;) I remember that well. I remember watching Dee Snider from Twisted Sister put a panel of senators to shame by being the worst dressed and most articulate guy in the room.
Sometimes it amazes me how much political energy, air time and public opinion is wasted on things like saving the children from the evils of GTA or making sure they don't hear nasty words in music (have they been to a school yard lately?) There are a few more important issues to kick around. I strongly suspect a lot of it is just a grab for political capital.
We do have a few advantages up here - a strong difference between the right wing Conservatives and the lefty New Democratic Party for instance - but there's signs of sliding. Folks from the RIAA have been lobbying hard up here. For a while, they had a Liberal MP (Liberal == middle of the road, MP == congressman) with responsibility for copyright reforms in their pocket. Then she got outed, lost in the election, and they bought off a Conservative.
It's this kind of thing that makes me pay less attention to party affiliation these days, and more to the person I'm voting for. There are good people in politics, they're just damned hard to find sometimes. When we find one we can believe, I think it's important to support them.
I've always loved that quote. It's sad that our leaders are so governed by opinion polls and focus groups. We had a prime minister for a while that led. Pierre Trudeau wasn't always necessarily popular, but he had a very clear idea what he thought the nation should look like. He didn't try to sneak it in - he never shied from telling people what he thought - but he was very clear that some things were just going to happen.
I wish I could find the quote, but when he was championing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, someone asked him about a section dealing with equal rights, I believe the bit about equal rights for homosexuals. His response was that some things are not a matter of opinion. (If anyone can give me the appropriate quote or context, I'd be grateful.) Today, it's difficult to imagine a politician not issuing some bland statement on the issue.
We have a lot of clowns these days....
There's all kinds of shenanigans that go on with corporate donations to candidates, but I think there's an easier explanation for this. Sen. Clinton seems to be trying to woo the soft Republicans - I mean those middle-of-the-road, non-neo-con, socially conservative types. She can't do it on abortion issues, or gay marriage without angering her Democratic base, so she's picked an issue that's fairly neutral but has that nice "family values" feel to it. And it's video games, so it's not like she's giving up an important issue or anything.
Except, of course, that this ignores First Amendment implications. I mostly like Sen. Clinton and Lieberman (even if he is a bit wishy-washy, I don't think he's Evil), but if this is their motivation, it makes me wonder about either their ability to discern what important issues for the future actually are, or that this issue is an acceptable loss in the bid to win back the White House. Either one seems bad.
PS. I'm one of those pinko-Canadians, so for me American politics is mostly a grand spectator sport. Flame on!
I've been developing nearly exclusively in PHP for somewhere around four years (just so you know, I'm not slagging the language for the hell of it. I've stored up a good dose of pain.)
It's the 3000+ functions in the global (and only) namespace. It's the inconsistant function naming ('2' or 'to', underscores or not) and parameters (needle-haystack or haystack-needle.) It's the poor quality of much of PEAR (not that there aren't some fine packages there, but they are not the majority)
The sole reason I use it. This shouldn't be underestimated.
No better than any other environment, and not as good as many. You can do things like step through code and set breakpoints, but the pain involved in getting that set up is huge.
See my rant in this thread here
PHP's documentation is one of my big complaints. I don't want to disparage the huge community effort in it, but it just doesn't compare favorably to that available for other languages. Read through the comment threads on php.net, and you'll find mistakes, clumsy workarounds and just general Bad Ideas all over the place. The documentation itself is frequently obtuse (see sprintf for a fine example. A great deal of time is spent on using it for argument swapping, something I've never had to do this way in PHP. It's actual purpose is too quickly passed over for someone new to programming.)
Apparently none of these are enough to overcome the advantage of a large install base, but I am seriously looking at moving to a different language. It's just unfortunate I'll be leaving a lot of experience behind when I do.
Yeah, not really. Ubiquity and knowing that certain things (like database connectivity) come with a standard install are the only reasons I use it. I'm dying to move to another language for development, but at the moment PHP is king of the hill in Free-land on those two counts.
Not quite sure what you mean by this, unless you mean the lack of an install base out there. I've been fortunate enough to be able to switch entirely to PHP5, and going back to 4 would be extremely painful.
My current PHP gripe is the community itself - not to disparage the many fine folk in it, but among many there is a definite distrust (bordering on hostility) to good architecture. Browse through PEAR sometime to see what I mean. There are some good libraries there, but many of them are a huge PITA to shoe-horn into a decent architecture. There's a slow change working through it. People like Harry Fueks have been evangelizing things like patterns, and there seems to be some slow realization coming that there's more to putting together a decent web app than mixing random code into your HTML.
What makes me despair is that I find myself drawn into too many arguments about whether MVC is "worth it", why patterns aren't "over-architecting" and on and on. I know that there are good, professional PHP developers out there (I work with some, thank god), but this alone* is making me consider a jump to another language. If I can figure out which it should be.
* Not that I don't have other reasons as well, but one gripe at a time ;) )
Remember, too, that we have about 1/10 the population of the states. If you're just looking at raw numbers, we'll never have a similar number of top universities as the US does. Or at least you'd better hope we never do ;)
Y'know, foolishly enough, that never occurred to me. I'll blame the painkillers. I used to like emacs a lot, and probably still would if I switched back. Of course, I also like trying out new editors, so having a ready excuse didn't bother me too much./p>
I'll probably stick to the vim side of the fence unless some really compelling reason to switch comes up, if only to preserve my monstrous .vimrc ;)
Which is why I switched from emacs. Ever tried coding in emacs with a broken wrist? It's hard enough with two functional hands.
Yep, that's the stuff. You know those annoyingly cute mouse-trailers that were all the rage a couple years ago? Same idea. Capturing the data is pretty easy. Making something meaningful out of all that data is something else.