You could be right, but then again, he, or at least his campaigners, apparently didn't think that this part of the Republican base would come out if they distrusted McCain as much as they did Obama.
I also think that he was elected in the Primaries simply because any sane Republican could sense that a conservative like Huckabee would be identified too much with Bush, and therefore be slaughtered by anything the Democrats would put against him. McCain at least had a chance.
But then they fucked that tactic up with Palin. Maybe they decided they didn't want to win this time.
This is just my view from another country, where Obama would qualify as a social-liberal, and therefore center right.
Germany doesn't have a presidential election simply because the president of Germany does not wield any power. He simply represents the state towards foreign nations, much like a European monarch. The true power is with the chancellor, who is a chosen member of parliament. Maybe it's better to state that the President of Germany doesn't wield power because he is not elected.
The EU doesn't have a Presidential election, simply because there's no EU president. There is a President of the Commission, but he's not presiding the EU. His name is Barroso, btw.
He is more akin to the highest civil servant. In the EU, the true power is wielded by the council of ministers, members of the (elected) governments of the individual nations. What they say, goes. The commission will implement. In effect, the leaders of Germany and France wield significantly more power than Barroso.
I, for one, am vehemently opposed to anything resembling an EU president. I only have to look at the other side of the Atlantic to see how rotten ever higher levels of government can become.
The EU is not a federation, such as the US. Most European countries don't have a president/monarch that matters, but rather a prime minister, elected out of parliament. The exception being France. It's quite important to grasp these differences if you want to make statements about the democratic legitimacy of foreign governments.
Coming from a country with such a dodgy proportional representation system, I would like to clear up one thing. In the history of my country, it has never happened that a party had an absolute majority, and could govern without having at least one other party in power. This is the rule in proportional representation, not the exception. This works fine. You don't get massive changes, and you don't get incumbent parties such as the Republicrats that require nothing short of a revolution to get rid of. You could simply marginalize them until they clean up their act.
In a proportional system (and the US congress seems to be a good one to do proportionally. Not the senate), Ron Paul could start up a party and get a few seats. Nader could start up one to get some legislation going. So would the libertarians and the Greens.
It is in my eyes unimaginable that movements with so much support do not get any form of representation in the government.
Not having proportional representation anywhere in the system is plainly a flaw in the US system. It's not accidental that the German system (written for a large part with aid and supervision by the US) is for a large part proportional. It's a feature, not a bug.
McCain might have won if he had picked a moderate as his running mate.
I doubt it. He could have chosen Joe Liebermann, and he would have gotten many centralist votes off of Obama. He probably would have gotten quite a few Hillary-is-the-Messiah votes as well, just out of spite. However, he would still have lost, as with such a ticket, the Republican base would just have stayed at home. He needed Palin to get them to vote.
Yes it is. The numbers add up. As another poster mentioned, enough extra cpu's for 24 hours a day does add up to your salary.
Absolutely not, especially in web development. Do you think Google would still be in business if they stopped developing after Version 1.0? Have you noticed that YouTube is able to react to something as small as an XKCD comic, in order to deliver new features?
No, programming is an ongoing expense. So you want to develop in something maintainable, and in something that can scale, even if you can't scale yet.
Ok, programming is an ongoing expense. But do notice that hardware and maintainance of said hardware is an ongoing expense as well. You need to balance the two. Not being able to scale yet means that you cannot scale. The product is unfinished.
Oh, and horizontal scaling is more important than vertical scaling, for pretty much all web apps. Vertical scalability is what you're assuming is important -- squeezing more out of every cycle of a single machine. Horizontal scaling is about making sure that you can simply throw more servers at the problem, and your app will actually be able to run concurrently on multiple cores, and on multiple machines, without falling over.
I didn't claim anything around horizontal or vertical scaling. You're assuming I'm talking about wasting cycles here, but I'm not. I am talking about proper design for scaling, as well as proper coding to make use of that scaling. Both of these take time and thought. In my experience, a team that does not take excellent care of the details of their code to make sure that the individual components run smoothly and fast is very likely to make some large errors in their design to prevent them from scaling properly. One such error for a web application is building a CRUD application with dependence on a separate relational database tier to maintain state. This creates highly maintainable and easy to comprehend code that will not scale horizontally without some drastic measures. This is about 90% of the web-apps right there, and armies upon armies of DBA's and IT personel are full-time employed to keep such applications somewhat performing. This is considered best practice in the field and Oracle is laughing all the way to the bank.
Finally, you mention Google. Have you ever looked at the attention to detail that comes out of Google in their high-scalability code. The web-parser is in C, simply because that's the fastest way to parse html. They might have a million machines to do this, but they do want to finish the job of parsing the internet as quickly as possible, simply because that means you can do it more often with the same hardware.
Their generated html has all unnecessary fluff such as extraneuous whitespace removed, simply because every byte counts over the network. The generated javascript: no extra whitespace, and with short variable names. Same reason.
There's no app-server involved, no database dependency in the response cycle, they've developed their own file-system, tuned their own fork of the OS to perfection, developed their own frameworks for using their hardware, etc., etc., etc. Google is by far the best example of my point: they have not offloaded any programmer's work on the maintenance staff. The programmers create code to do the job from the high-level scalability design down to the low-level optimizations that make it run smoothly in practice. The maintenance staff takes care of the hardware, and doesn't have the additional burden of covering for slack on the side of the developers. If you take care of detail, you can provide higher quality code, smoother operations, and overall a lower total cost of developing and running your app.
You're missing the scope of the argument here. I'm not talking here about the moral right, asserted in, amongst many other writings, the US constitution, to fight an oppressive government.
I'm arguing against the assumption that the 2nd amendment was put in place by the amazing founders to give gun-toting idiots the feeling that they don't have to change their society the hard way as they can always shoot their way out of trouble. It's that presumption that is bugging me, and I merely point out that there's no law on the books, in the constitution or otherwise, that allows a person to take matters in their own hands to perform self-defense against a government he deems oppressive.
As another poster pointed out. The US constitution says:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...
This is a general moral statement about the relationship between Governments and the People. Governments are there for the People, and only have a right of existing with consent of the People. That there's an obvious violence implied when governments don't abide the people we can take for granted.
Now fast-forward to the post I was replying to:
Well, do you acknowledge the right of self defense against agents of an oppressive state?
If nothing else, having a significant percentage of the population armed and trained gives pause to an oppressive regime which would use force against it's citizens.
Here's the gun-slinger in action. Instead of the People that abolish or alter Governments because they no longer govern with the People's consent, we are now looking at an individual who thinks it's excellent to kill cops if they come from a regime that he finds oppressive. Furthermore, he wants to arm himself and a significant percentage of the population because that will keep that government at bay. Apart from the fact that every government, oppressive or not, uses force against it's citizens (if they broke the law and especially when they start shooting agents) do you see the intense disconnect between the high moral principle of the constitution, and the egotistical reasoning of the gun-slinger. No thought is given about exactly how an oppressive government needs to be replaced, nor is any consensus sought to form a wide enough body of man (a People) to figure out what needs to be done.
No, this is the reasoning of an egotistical individual with a gun. As all this reasoning is vehemently not about the People, but about disconnected individuals not happy with his government, the rights in the constitution do not seem to apply, yet common law, outlawing such actions, does.
If you're talking about performance, you have a point. Unfortunately, it's not a very good one. Programmers are expensive. CPU isn't. And the Web is one place where, if needed, you can simply throw more CPU at the problem.
Snicker. You've just offloaded your incompetence to a small army of IT personnel that now needs to keep a farm of servers running 24x7.
That army is expensive, the datacenter that needs to be used is expensive. The programmer is just a one time expense.
Yes, for European standards Obama's on the fringe of extreme right and lunatic right, but as we don't have a word to describe the political position of his opponents, we'll use Centrist for Obama to allow some discourse.
In fact I dare say that western nations with more free gun ownership tend to also be the ones with a better living standards.
[Citation needed]. In the right corner we have the United States with free gun ownership: extremely wealthy with high standard of living (except for the third-world conditions in various locations where people tend to shoot eachother). On the other hand we have the entirety of Northern Europe with very strict regulations on gun ownership (except for Belgium): extremely wealthy with high standards of living (and no third-world conditions in sight). So far, a tie. Then we have the rest of the world, with varying levels of standards of living and gun control. You've got Russia, guns allowed but licensed, Afghanistan & Iraq, anything goes there (and in the case of Iraq, even Saddam allowed guns for the population), the rising stars in the firmament, China and India, having fairly strict gun control, and the other rising start, Brazil, without any gun control.
Nope, I don't see any reason to assume that gun control has anything to do with standards of living. What gave you this idea?
Well, do you acknowledge the right of self defense against agents of an oppressive state?
Is this one of the human rights? As far as I know, no nation in the world allows you self-defense against the state (also known as cop-killing). There is also no nation in the world that has a law on the books that states: "If we, your government, suddenly turns oppressive (determined by the citizen's opinion), it is hunky dory to kill cops."
As I understand it, the 2nd amendment gives you the right to wave your guns around, it doesn't give you the right to use them on people.
And as a final note. You do realize that Iraq under Saddam had a pretty high percentage of private gun ownership? It didn't seem to matter.
This has been reasonably well researched in the Netherlands, and yes, it turns out that cannabis does lead to higher incidence of psychosis. It's not a statistical artifact, it's real. People vulnerable to this are advised to stay away from cannabis. Yes, it's a bummer that cannabis is not a complete care-free drug, but such is life.
Well, even then we might be hard pressed to exhaust the space. Remember: 2^128 ~ 10^38. With 10^49 atoms on earth, if we convert the entire earth mass into ipv6 stacks, we would need stacks using less than 10^11 atoms to actually exhaust the address space. 10^11 atoms is pretty small, e.g., taking silocon at 28 grams/mole, this will roughly translate to 10^-11 grams of chip per ipv6 stack. That's a very small chip, and no earth left to move around on.
Though I really like your take on multi-threading.
So, you actually don't believe in insurance? You don't see the advantage in collectively taking care of the cost of happenstance? I'm pretty sure you lead a comfortable life now, and I sincerely hope you will not contract a disease that will be more expensive than what you can pay for. Because then you will die, while you could have lived, by letting your smoking neighbour bear a bit of the cost.
A pure functional language would be a language where there are no side effects. I.e., you can't change the state of anything, you can only construct new things out of existing things. As this gives some problems with IO, Haskell, taking purity to the extreme, had to wait for the invention of Monads to be able to do IO. Yes, Haskell was not capable of IO (reading/writing) for years. Functional languages follow this pattern: side-effects are only permitted if there is no other way. Examples are Lisp and Scheme, but also Matlab, Mathematica and Scala. Other languages allow side-effects by default, and have functional aspects in other respects. Examples of these are Javascript, Ruby, Python, Java, C++, C and even assembler (programming without any functional aspects is going to be hard). Quite likely Javascript programming can be done almost purely functionally. But so can C.
So, if you can show me that you can't have mutable variables in Javascript, we can call it functional.
Not completely comfortable with Sun Ray, but maybe, just maybe, get a rescue disk for the machine, reboot the machine from the rescue disk, thereby gaining root access to the entire system, install the keylogger for all users, and reboot the machine cleanly?
Physical access does mean that you have access to the machine itself and afaik, there's not a machine that turns into a brick when a password is lost. There's always a way.
Uhm, you are using the problems with a materialistic theory such as the big-bang to imply that we need serious study into someone's imaginary friend that by definition lives outside of time and causality? Please point out how this 'testing' could conceivably be performed without falsifiability? What observation needs to be made to prove the 'theory' wrong? Heck, even the non-existence of this universe would not be sufficient evidence to discount the Creator theory.
Please explain: how does evolutionary theory depend on the universe suddenly popping into existence (or always having existed)? I cannot recall any such dependency on cosmology.
There's only one thing worse than a government monopoly, and that's a private monopoly. Think about it, the pressure on competitiveness is the same (none), there is more pressure on quality on the government (elections), and there is a big tendency to get personal gains from the private monopoly.
So, yes, if there's only one ISP company to get service from, you've got a better bet to go with the government. If there's true competition, better go with that, but you have to still keep an eye out that they won't kill the commons (companies are pretty poor at maintaining infrastructure as it costs money without a direct positive in the next few quarters).
American Football was most likely called "Football" to distinguish it from polo, which was also a popular game in the U.S. at the time. That is, a game played on one's feet, not on horseback.
Unlikely, as the origins of American football lie in the game of rugby, which, way back in time was called football. The UK rugby associations still have the word 'football' in their name, and Australia has its (rougher) variant called Australian football. A Kiwi friend of mine claims that in the good old days, when sports was done by gentlemen, a game of football (soccer) was played, in which it happened that this scoundrel, Lord Rugby, picked up the ball with his hands and started running to the goal with it. Of course his opponents couldn't let him get away with that and started pursuit to stop him reaching that.
A new game was born and we're paying the price of inapt naming ever since.
Big companies don't pay a lot of tax, big companies don't create a lot of jobs. It's small companies that have the tax burden and small companies who employ most people.
It's just easier to cater for big companies, because there are so few of them. Easier to get money from.
IP laws favour big companies, stiffling innovation. Small companies pay the price, and the economy likewise suffer. Hundreds of thousands also depended on the horse industry, we're all richer because we didn't cater to them.
Optimal play is different. If the odds say you should call 9 out of 10 times, you draw a random number and call exactly 9 out of 10 times. No information is given to the opponent, and the strategy cannot be exploited. Of course, this all assumes that you can calculate the optimal odds, which is doubtful.
Actually, it's almost a logical necessity. As one of the old greeks already argued: assume two objects of different mass fall at a speed related to their mass. Say a rock and a feather. Observations show that, indeed, the rock falls faster than the feather (but for reasons unrelated to gravity as will be shown).
Now connect the two object by a rope and let the combined object drop. The combined object is heavier than the sum of individual object (by exactly one rope-mass), so it should drop faster. However, the the feather will, ever so lightly, drag at the rock causing it to fall slower.
So the rock-feather-rope combination should drop faster and is expected (even observed) to drop slower. Therefore the hypothesis that mass is related to speed must be false.
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But then they fucked that tactic up with Palin. Maybe they decided they didn't want to win this time.
This is just my view from another country, where Obama would qualify as a social-liberal, and therefore center right.
The EU doesn't have a Presidential election, simply because there's no EU president. There is a President of the Commission, but he's not presiding the EU. His name is Barroso, btw. He is more akin to the highest civil servant. In the EU, the true power is wielded by the council of ministers, members of the (elected) governments of the individual nations. What they say, goes. The commission will implement. In effect, the leaders of Germany and France wield significantly more power than Barroso. I, for one, am vehemently opposed to anything resembling an EU president. I only have to look at the other side of the Atlantic to see how rotten ever higher levels of government can become.
The EU is not a federation, such as the US. Most European countries don't have a president/monarch that matters, but rather a prime minister, elected out of parliament. The exception being France. It's quite important to grasp these differences if you want to make statements about the democratic legitimacy of foreign governments.
In a proportional system (and the US congress seems to be a good one to do proportionally. Not the senate), Ron Paul could start up a party and get a few seats. Nader could start up one to get some legislation going. So would the libertarians and the Greens. It is in my eyes unimaginable that movements with so much support do not get any form of representation in the government.
Not having proportional representation anywhere in the system is plainly a flaw in the US system. It's not accidental that the German system (written for a large part with aid and supervision by the US) is for a large part proportional. It's a feature, not a bug.
I doubt it. He could have chosen Joe Liebermann, and he would have gotten many centralist votes off of Obama. He probably would have gotten quite a few Hillary-is-the-Messiah votes as well, just out of spite. However, he would still have lost, as with such a ticket, the Republican base would just have stayed at home. He needed Palin to get them to vote.
In other words, he didn't have a chance.
Well, duh. Of course you haven't gotten anything out of their oil. Exxon, Chevron and Haliburton have. According to doctrine, that is even better!
Granted, and apologies
Yes it is. The numbers add up. As another poster mentioned, enough extra cpu's for 24 hours a day does add up to your salary.
Ok, programming is an ongoing expense. But do notice that hardware and maintainance of said hardware is an ongoing expense as well. You need to balance the two. Not being able to scale yet means that you cannot scale. The product is unfinished.
I didn't claim anything around horizontal or vertical scaling. You're assuming I'm talking about wasting cycles here, but I'm not. I am talking about proper design for scaling, as well as proper coding to make use of that scaling. Both of these take time and thought. In my experience, a team that does not take excellent care of the details of their code to make sure that the individual components run smoothly and fast is very likely to make some large errors in their design to prevent them from scaling properly. One such error for a web application is building a CRUD application with dependence on a separate relational database tier to maintain state. This creates highly maintainable and easy to comprehend code that will not scale horizontally without some drastic measures. This is about 90% of the web-apps right there, and armies upon armies of DBA's and IT personel are full-time employed to keep such applications somewhat performing. This is considered best practice in the field and Oracle is laughing all the way to the bank.
Finally, you mention Google. Have you ever looked at the attention to detail that comes out of Google in their high-scalability code. The web-parser is in C, simply because that's the fastest way to parse html. They might have a million machines to do this, but they do want to finish the job of parsing the internet as quickly as possible, simply because that means you can do it more often with the same hardware.
Their generated html has all unnecessary fluff such as extraneuous whitespace removed, simply because every byte counts over the network. The generated javascript: no extra whitespace, and with short variable names. Same reason.
There's no app-server involved, no database dependency in the response cycle, they've developed their own file-system, tuned their own fork of the OS to perfection, developed their own frameworks for using their hardware, etc., etc., etc. Google is by far the best example of my point: they have not offloaded any programmer's work on the maintenance staff. The programmers create code to do the job from the high-level scalability design down to the low-level optimizations that make it run smoothly in practice. The maintenance staff takes care of the hardware, and doesn't have the additional burden of covering for slack on the side of the developers. If you take care of detail, you can provide higher quality code, smoother operations, and overall a lower total cost of developing and running your app.
You're missing the scope of the argument here. I'm not talking here about the moral right, asserted in, amongst many other writings, the US constitution, to fight an oppressive government. I'm arguing against the assumption that the 2nd amendment was put in place by the amazing founders to give gun-toting idiots the feeling that they don't have to change their society the hard way as they can always shoot their way out of trouble. It's that presumption that is bugging me, and I merely point out that there's no law on the books, in the constitution or otherwise, that allows a person to take matters in their own hands to perform self-defense against a government he deems oppressive.
As another poster pointed out. The US constitution says:
This is a general moral statement about the relationship between Governments and the People. Governments are there for the People, and only have a right of existing with consent of the People. That there's an obvious violence implied when governments don't abide the people we can take for granted.
Now fast-forward to the post I was replying to:
Here's the gun-slinger in action. Instead of the People that abolish or alter Governments because they no longer govern with the People's consent, we are now looking at an individual who thinks it's excellent to kill cops if they come from a regime that he finds oppressive. Furthermore, he wants to arm himself and a significant percentage of the population because that will keep that government at bay. Apart from the fact that every government, oppressive or not, uses force against it's citizens (if they broke the law and especially when they start shooting agents) do you see the intense disconnect between the high moral principle of the constitution, and the egotistical reasoning of the gun-slinger. No thought is given about exactly how an oppressive government needs to be replaced, nor is any consensus sought to form a wide enough body of man (a People) to figure out what needs to be done.
No, this is the reasoning of an egotistical individual with a gun. As all this reasoning is vehemently not about the People, but about disconnected individuals not happy with his government, the rights in the constitution do not seem to apply, yet common law, outlawing such actions, does.
Snicker. You've just offloaded your incompetence to a small army of IT personnel that now needs to keep a farm of servers running 24x7. That army is expensive, the datacenter that needs to be used is expensive. The programmer is just a one time expense.
Yes, for European standards Obama's on the fringe of extreme right and lunatic right, but as we don't have a word to describe the political position of his opponents, we'll use Centrist for Obama to allow some discourse.
[Citation needed]. In the right corner we have the United States with free gun ownership: extremely wealthy with high standard of living (except for the third-world conditions in various locations where people tend to shoot eachother). On the other hand we have the entirety of Northern Europe with very strict regulations on gun ownership (except for Belgium): extremely wealthy with high standards of living (and no third-world conditions in sight). So far, a tie. Then we have the rest of the world, with varying levels of standards of living and gun control. You've got Russia, guns allowed but licensed, Afghanistan & Iraq, anything goes there (and in the case of Iraq, even Saddam allowed guns for the population), the rising stars in the firmament, China and India, having fairly strict gun control, and the other rising start, Brazil, without any gun control.
Nope, I don't see any reason to assume that gun control has anything to do with standards of living. What gave you this idea?
Is this one of the human rights? As far as I know, no nation in the world allows you self-defense against the state (also known as cop-killing). There is also no nation in the world that has a law on the books that states: "If we, your government, suddenly turns oppressive (determined by the citizen's opinion), it is hunky dory to kill cops." As I understand it, the 2nd amendment gives you the right to wave your guns around, it doesn't give you the right to use them on people.
And as a final note. You do realize that Iraq under Saddam had a pretty high percentage of private gun ownership? It didn't seem to matter.
This has been reasonably well researched in the Netherlands, and yes, it turns out that cannabis does lead to higher incidence of psychosis. It's not a statistical artifact, it's real. People vulnerable to this are advised to stay away from cannabis. Yes, it's a bummer that cannabis is not a complete care-free drug, but such is life.
Though I really like your take on multi-threading.
So, you actually don't believe in insurance? You don't see the advantage in collectively taking care of the cost of happenstance? I'm pretty sure you lead a comfortable life now, and I sincerely hope you will not contract a disease that will be more expensive than what you can pay for. Because then you will die, while you could have lived, by letting your smoking neighbour bear a bit of the cost.
So, if you can show me that you can't have mutable variables in Javascript, we can call it functional.
Physical access does mean that you have access to the machine itself and afaik, there's not a machine that turns into a brick when a password is lost. There's always a way.
Uhm, you are using the problems with a materialistic theory such as the big-bang to imply that we need serious study into someone's imaginary friend that by definition lives outside of time and causality? Please point out how this 'testing' could conceivably be performed without falsifiability? What observation needs to be made to prove the 'theory' wrong? Heck, even the non-existence of this universe would not be sufficient evidence to discount the Creator theory.
Please explain: how does evolutionary theory depend on the universe suddenly popping into existence (or always having existed)? I cannot recall any such dependency on cosmology.
So, yes, if there's only one ISP company to get service from, you've got a better bet to go with the government. If there's true competition, better go with that, but you have to still keep an eye out that they won't kill the commons (companies are pretty poor at maintaining infrastructure as it costs money without a direct positive in the next few quarters).
Unlikely, as the origins of American football lie in the game of rugby, which, way back in time was called football. The UK rugby associations still have the word 'football' in their name, and Australia has its (rougher) variant called Australian football. A Kiwi friend of mine claims that in the good old days, when sports was done by gentlemen, a game of football (soccer) was played, in which it happened that this scoundrel, Lord Rugby, picked up the ball with his hands and started running to the goal with it. Of course his opponents couldn't let him get away with that and started pursuit to stop him reaching that.
A new game was born and we're paying the price of inapt naming ever since.
So, in your neck of the woods rush hour consists of 1 in 100 cars breaking down? What the hell are you guys driving? T-Fords?
It's just easier to cater for big companies, because there are so few of them. Easier to get money from.
IP laws favour big companies, stiffling innovation. Small companies pay the price, and the economy likewise suffer. Hundreds of thousands also depended on the horse industry, we're all richer because we didn't cater to them.
Optimal play is different. If the odds say you should call 9 out of 10 times, you draw a random number and call exactly 9 out of 10 times. No information is given to the opponent, and the strategy cannot be exploited. Of course, this all assumes that you can calculate the optimal odds, which is doubtful.
Now connect the two object by a rope and let the combined object drop. The combined object is heavier than the sum of individual object (by exactly one rope-mass), so it should drop faster. However, the the feather will, ever so lightly, drag at the rock causing it to fall slower.
So the rock-feather-rope combination should drop faster and is expected (even observed) to drop slower. Therefore the hypothesis that mass is related to speed must be false.