We have all this Olympic hype that's supposed to somehow enhance the games, and everybody takes it seriously, but in fact it doesn't do anything but parasitically perpetuate and expand itself.
I've watched Olympics since the 1960s, and while there was already quite a bit of hype involved back then, it is nothing like it is today. I saw Olga Korbut transform women's gymnastics, I saw Nadia Comaneci score a perfect 10 on her bars routine. I saw Mark Spitz score 7 gold medals in 1972, and I also saw Mark Phelps in 2004, thirty two years later, try and fail to break that record. The 2004 technology of course made it much easier to follow what was going on, to see the athleticism of the competitors. But the frankly bizarre ceremonial floor shows did nothing at all to enhance Phelps' achievements.
Look, clearly the modern Olympics is just silly and pretentious. The idea that is some kind of movement that unites humanity in sport is so bizarre it defies belief anybody could seriously pretend it is true. If that's true, why do athletes march, like troops, behind their national flags? Why is the big triumph standing on the podium and having your national anthem played?
The ancient Olympiad didn't have any of these kind of national (or city state) trappings. I'm sure that people had their home town favorites, but athletes traveled under the Olympic truce to compete at the games as individuals.
I think it's great that people look at track and field, archery, judo and badminton etc. every four years. But the shear pretentiousness of the whole enterprise is galling. The drawn out fiasco of the Olympic torch relay was the wages of misty eyed attachment to an absurdity.
It'd all be just as good, or better, without all the ridiculous hype. I think it's bad that it's a show, that it's become bread and circuses doused with saccharine political symbolism, like a political convention where red and white balloons dropping from the ceiling are supposed to mean something.
It's not a just slippery slope argument. NBC News has violated an important rule for any news organization. It knowingly presented falsified images as true.
True, the harm it does to viewers is trivial. The party that is harmed is NBC news. If NBC did not issue a disclaimer while showing the images in question, what it tells us is that NBC News is willing to mislead us if in their opinion the viewers are better off believing the falsehoods.
So, if NBC doesn't subscribe to the theory that fictionalized representations of the facts ought to bear a disclaimer, then we must wonder exactly what they think the boundaries of their license to tinker with reality are.
Naturally, I think this is just a stupid gaffe. But if I were in charge of this particular NBC operation, I'd be issuing an apology and promise not to do it again.
Well -- let me try to put the problem to you in a reasonable way.
No, there's nothing wrong with using CGI to goose up an entertainment show. And sports are entertainment. But sports broadcasting isn't just entertainment, it's journalism. If you see film of a fantastic baseball play, you expect you can trust it hasn't been enhanced to make it better. When two rival teams meet, you expect the statitics cited on their past performance are accurate, not ginned up to make things more dramatic.
But of course Sports is still entertainment. They trowel on hyperbole thick and deep. They cherry pick factoids to turn every moment they can into a dramatic story.
And what we're talking about wasn't even a sport event. It was a spectacle.
In the end, it comes down to drawing lines. There's always a line between the inexcusable and the excusable, and things that lay just on either side of the line aren't going to be all that different from each other. It's like the line between night and day, wheresoever you choose to set that line, the moments on either side are hard to distinguish. But if the difference between night and day is important, it's a bad idea to play around with that line -- especially if you aren't up front about it.
Remember, the Olympic broadcast is produced by an NBC News bureau. So an NBC News bureau, if the report is true, has knowingly presented as factual images of things that did not happen. That's a serious thing.
In itself, this little misdeed didn't do any harm, except to one thing: that fuzzy but all important line between the excusable and inexcusable.
In the future, when a campaign presents the news organization with excellent "footage" of their candidate in which protesters have been digitally erased, would it really be that harmful just to put it on? After all, everybody knows that there are people who don't agree with the candidate who would protest if they were allowed to. Let the line erode, and we'll eventually see this, and worse.
Ted Williams, the great Boston Red Sox slugger, had a career high batting average of.344. Only a half dozen batters have have higher career averages. He finished three seasons batting.400 or higher:.400,.406 and.407. One of his gifts was a remarkable ability to judge whether a pitch was going to be in the strike zone. It was remarked once to him that he probably could eke out a few more hits if he swung at pitches just outside the strike zone. After a thinking for a moment, he replied, "But then I wouldn't know where to stop."
My elderly mom was once stuck in her apartment by a jammed deadbolt. She couldn't get the super, and there was no exit, not even a fire escape, only a third floor balcony.
Rather than call the Fire Department, she called me. I came over, and she buzzed me in, then I kicked her front door in (let's say I'm a little bigger than average). It took me two or three tries to break the hinges.
Not a single soul peeked out to see what was going on, or called the cops.
My wife grew up in the suburbs and I grew up in the city. One of her pet peeves is that I tend to leave the doors of our car unlocked when I park. The difference is that I grew up in a neighborhood where some people would smash your windows if they saw anything in it they might want.
Nobody in my neighborhood had fancy car stereos; they either had plain old AM/FM radios, or they had a hole in their dashboard with wires hanging out.
Some of the kids had almost a hacker's attitude towards breaking into cars. Things you left out in your car, in plain view (like a car stereo I guess) were pretty much looked on as abandoned property. But it was the drug addicts to smashed windows. The classier kids didn't do more damage than necessary, unless they decided to take your car for a ride.
I was visiting the old neighborhood once and locked my keys in my car. One of the local kids who was sitting on his front porch asked if I needed help, and I said yes. He disappeared into his apartment and came out with a few tools. He had my car open almost as fast as I could do it with a key, literally in about ten seconds. Didn't leave a scratch on the car, either.
I think the people who think that surface of the Earth is the interior of a sphere are much more interesting.
For some of them the Universe is a hollow bubble (which I suppose you might say it is, in very rough sense) and the Earth is the interior surface of that bubble. Others have a more conventional cosmology, in which the Earth is a sphere in space -- just a hollow one. Some of those people believe we are living on the inside of the sphere, others that we are (as conventionally believed) on the outside of the sphere, and that the interior and polar regions are inhabited by the Hyperborean race.
Believers in the Hyperborean race tend to be those who give more credence to obscure references in Greek mythology than modern polar expeditions, which you have to admit makes for a higher class of twaddle. It's a pity so many of them are neo-nazis.
There's a lesson here for small application vendors.
You don't make money maximizing the value of the things you sell. You make money maximizing your net margin over all your sales. Of course, everyone knows this, but they don't act like they know it. Salemen running companies are the most prone to thinking gross instead of net.
I once worked for a guy who was really frustrated that people were making money on trivial apps -- ring tones were his pet peeve -- while he was making good apps that did really important things for people, and constantly scrambling to keep his head above water. Well, that's not a coincidence. If you spent $1.99 for a ring tone, you aren't going to call for tech support. If you spent $100,000 for a piece of mission critical software, you jolly well are.
So the real determinant of whether you make money with software that does important things is whether you can turn a profit on support. It's better to forgo new sales than to add features to your product that reduce the profitability of support. It can be counterintuitive in a competitive sales environment to let the other guy pick up sales. The instinct is to match him feature for feature in a death match for who will capture the most sales, but if your product has significant support costs, you have to think of the business more like a consultancy. Efficiency and sustainability matter.
So, if you're looking to make money selling software you develop, you've either got to plan to sell your business to somebody it's more to than the cash flow, or you've got to plan to make money on support.
That's probably why the open source business model has been more successful than people thought it could possibly be. In the end a sustainable software business (leaving aside novelty apps) has to be built around profitable support. Of course sales do matter, but they're only step 1.
It wasn't on anybody's security radar screen until, if I recall, the Morris Worm. So you could have an app that passes all the items on the best security checklist in existence, but if it read input into a local variable without checking the length (as nearly all of us C programmers did, back in the day, and some apparently still do), then your app was wide open.
The discovery of a new class of attack vector can indeed have far-reaching implications, beyond the vendor that's the target of the first practical demonstration.
But it' not an everyday occurrence. It ain't easy to to think up something that is truly new in an area where there is a lot talent working. Mostly, you come up with refinements and insights on what is already known. Richard Feynman discussed this in one of his books, that there was only one point in his entire career where, for a few hours, he knew something about the laws of physics that nobody else did.
So it's probably still just saber rattling, but such a thing could exist.
It's because in a plurality voting system, the stable configuration is for two parties to claim the two large, reasonably contiguous blocks of voters as their base. Then they define the political landscape in terms of an axis drawn between the two blocks, the precise orientation of which is somewhat arbitrary. Finally they build winning coalitions of voters by starting with people in their base, and poaching voters just over the borders of the other party's territory. They do this by (a) pretending to be closer to the center of mass of all voters than they really are, and (b) pretending the other party is further from the center of mass of all voters than they really are.
Destroy the system and let a new one evolve in its place, under the same rules, and you'll get the same configuration. The axis may be drawn slightly differently, but it will function the same.
So, it's not not true that there is not difference between the two parties. There are real differences between the two parties. However these differences don't exhaust the possible ways you could build parties; the exact direction that the "left-right" axis culd be drawn other ways. Furthermore, the parties strive to cover over their real differences when they're in a head to head match up.
George W. Bush illustrate this. He is a candidate who never would be nominated by the Democrats, which right there shows you that there are differences between the parties. He might not have been the best candidate the Republicans could have put up, but that's a different issue. During the election for his first term, Bush sold himself as a "compassionate conservative", which is classic political boundary poaching.
Maybe the reason is that he actually is more relaxed and comfortable.
Agreed, by I'm not a jump on the bandwagon type; I like to keep one foot firmly grounded in skepticism.
I think that Obama is rare, dually gifted individual. He's got the intellect to be a professor of Constitutional law, but he also has really strong people skills. Of course he's comfortable. Anybody'd be comfortable if their life experience told them they'd be able to outdebate or persuade most people they deal with. People gifted in only one of these ways aren't uncommon, but there's often a gnawing canker of doubt about whether they're on the right track, or can persuade others that they are.
It doesn't make him "qualified" to be president, but those talents will stand him in good stead if he makes it.
People aren't sheep or parrots, but they do have possess cognitive biases and flaws -- bugs in the epistemological software if you will. One of which is that if you hear the same thing from multiple, apparently independent sources, you will tend to believe it provided you have no prior opinion or more credible source of information to the contrary.
But even though that is a timeworn strategy, it isn't sure fire.
Look at the McCain's forays into attack ads. In part, they've been poorly conceived and timed. The Paris Hilton thing might have worked as the final smack down in a long patient campaign to cut him down to size. But it was over the top. People know campaigns say bad things about the other guy, so you've got to start smaller.
Another factor is who you have to work against. People don't pay much attention to politics until it gets close to the time to vote. Nature abhors a vacuum, and you fill that vacuum with beliefs about the other guy. It worked with Gore and Kerry, but not with Clinton because of Clinton's charismatic personality. As a liberal Democrat, I'm lukewarm on Bill Clinton, in theory at least. Still I remember seeing him interviewed on TV a few years after he was out of office, and being amazed at his almost mesmeric powers of communication.
Reagan was like that too; maybe even more so. You had to really detest the man to be immune to his charm.
Time will tell, but I have an inkling Obama might be another politician of this sort. The McCain campaign is trying to define him, and the pundits are trying to turn him into a cipher, but if you watch him, what comes across is that he is completely comfortable with and utterly sure of who he is. Which doesn't preclude him being a cipher, of course, but that's not the same as being vacuum.
that the McCain campaign hasn't quite adapted to the changes technology has made in politics.
It isn't so much that his campaign lags in exploiting social networking techniques to its advantage. It's more that they haven't grasped the full implications of things like YouTube.
Politicians have always tuned their message to their audience, but in a world of cell phone video cameras and YouTube, your audience is always potentially much greater than the people sitting in front of you. It's important not to actually contradict yourself, and when you get caught contradicting yourself the worst thing you can do is to deny it. The assertion, contradiction and denial make a nice little YouTube vignette. Especially if all three bits are delivered in your trademarked blunt, plainspoken style.
This is probably why the campaign has changed its policy on access. McCain has always be famously accessible to reporters, taking questions for as long as anybody could think of any, spending lot of one on one time. This week they've switched, and now he's only giving scripted statements.
This is more of the same. They're trying to feed their blogosphere partisans the way they feed their mainstream media henchmen, even though (ironically) you have to be a lot more discreet with that sort of thing in the blogosphere.
I'm not saying McCain is necessarily worse than any other politician. Possibly Obama's just a slicker liar. Obama reminds me of Eisenhower, who had the gift of redirecting pointed questions in the direction he wanted the be questioned. For some reason, the television camera simply adores Obama; he's more relaxed and comfortable on camera than Phil Donahue.
But whether or not Obama's the real thing, or the slickest phony in a generation of politicians, McCain has definitely let his... shall we say strategically tailored representations of the the truth... show plainly for all to see. This is stuff that would have gone unnoticed ten years ago, or it it was noticed, reported in words rather than shown issuing from the candidate's mouth.
Well, for me the selling point was that DVDs, if handled correctly, play consistently.
A VHS tape in perfect condition in a player in perfect condition has acceptable quality for me. But the tape won't stay in perfect condition even over a moderate number of plays. If the player is dirty it won't play acceptably either.
If you're old enough to remember CDs, that was a big selling point for them over vinyl, although their durability was greatly exaggerated.
Well, there are a vast number of useful programs that could be characterized as filter programs. They take a stream of data, and perhaps a few configuration option, perform the same operation on a sequence of chunks from that stream, and produce an output stream. So much of the useful products of the first thirty or forty years of modern computing fall into this paradigm, that it's embedded in the very conceptual DNA of Unix, along with the pipe. A lot can be done with filter like programs and a staff that has been trained to use them to manage processes.
Things started to change in the 1980s, and but by the year 2000 these mechanisms, while still obviously usable, aren't quite as useful. A basic GUI program looks a lot like an operating system used to look: taking streams of events and routing them to various actors. Information is stored in complex systems such as databases or network services which have both state to be managed and interfaces that are sufficiently rich that they are either a language or bordering on it.
And if GUI prorams are kind of like operating systems used to be, the bits of software we code are marshalled into a common address space and are expected to behave themselves. And between all the things that have been coded by ourselves and others, there is an unlimited number of way we can interact, and even the simplest objects provide a rather rich and often idiosyncratic interface.
The thing about filters is that even a really badly coded filter conforms to an important design criterion: it has a simple, well defined interface.
Programs that would be considered quite simple these days would qualify as systems programs twenty five years ago. And there is much, much, much more detail you must attend to, a great deal of that having to do with arbitrary conventions and limitations of things your stuff has to interface with.
While we've gained a lot, we've lost something too. Programming today is often a lot more tedious than it was back in the day, because you've got so many more details to manage and attend to. Good design is about recapturing what we've lost, which is the ability to work on one aspect of a problem at a time.
Well, if you look at the basic, classic RoR demo, that shouldn't be that hard.
90% of the "oh wow" factor of RoR is that it takes care of managing so many niggling organizational, configuration and convention setting details at just the point where you really don't want to be burdened with them, but where other frameworks insist you must.
It's as if the barber you'd been going to all your life starts off every haircut by whacking you on the head with a mallet. Then one day you try a different barber, and you sit down expecting the mallet whack, but instead he just starts cutting your hair. Now your old barber featured stuff like lilac water and pomade and what not, but absence of mallet seems like an extremely significant feature if you've never tried it before.
Well, a couple of years ago I worked for an outfit that was hired by a startup that was going after various pots of government money. They wanted to sell technology to the DoD for, among other things, tracking reconstruction needs and efforts in Iraq.
They didn't have any engineers, so they hired us. The application they were promising cost about 10x what they were willing to pay, so pretty much the understanding was they were getting a model -- not even really a prototype -- of what the application might do. They also built a very impressive data center, even though they didn't have a single IT pro. The conference room where they courted their guests had a large glass wall with motorized shutters that would slide up to reveal the operations center. Normally the ops center was deserted, but they had some recent college grad gofers that they dressed in spiffy uniforms and who had to spend the day in the ops center looking busy when somebody was coming to visit.
They had enough money to do it all for real, but most of that money ended up going into lobbyists, so there was only the bare minimum available to actually develop the technology they were selling. We spent months working closely with them to help them land their first contract. After that we never heard from them again; the last I heard through the brother of one of their employees was that they'd hired the military officer who'd been responsible for helping them get their first contract, although I suspect it might have been through on of the CEO's father-in-law's companies.
So, don't put me in the surprised category.
We'd also looked at going after some homeland security projects ourselves, and what we found out was that the post 9/11 years were the golden age of lobbying. You pretty much needed a lobbyist to get in on the bonanza, and since lobbyists are expensive and make their money from large contracts, those guys with their shell operations center and application pretty much had the right approach if you wanted to succeed.
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We have all this Olympic hype that's supposed to somehow enhance the games, and everybody takes it seriously, but in fact it doesn't do anything but parasitically perpetuate and expand itself.
I've watched Olympics since the 1960s, and while there was already quite a bit of hype involved back then, it is nothing like it is today. I saw Olga Korbut transform women's gymnastics, I saw Nadia Comaneci score a perfect 10 on her bars routine. I saw Mark Spitz score 7 gold medals in 1972, and I also saw Mark Phelps in 2004, thirty two years later, try and fail to break that record. The 2004 technology of course made it much easier to follow what was going on, to see the athleticism of the competitors. But the frankly bizarre ceremonial floor shows did nothing at all to enhance Phelps' achievements.
Well, didn't work in Georgia, did it?
Look, clearly the modern Olympics is just silly and pretentious. The idea that is some kind of movement that unites humanity in sport is so bizarre it defies belief anybody could seriously pretend it is true. If that's true, why do athletes march, like troops, behind their national flags? Why is the big triumph standing on the podium and having your national anthem played?
The ancient Olympiad didn't have any of these kind of national (or city state) trappings. I'm sure that people had their home town favorites, but athletes traveled under the Olympic truce to compete at the games as individuals.
I think it's great that people look at track and field, archery, judo and badminton etc. every four years. But the shear pretentiousness of the whole enterprise is galling. The drawn out fiasco of the Olympic torch relay was the wages of misty eyed attachment to an absurdity.
It'd all be just as good, or better, without all the ridiculous hype. I think it's bad that it's a show, that it's become bread and circuses doused with saccharine political symbolism, like a political convention where red and white balloons dropping from the ceiling are supposed to mean something.
It's not a just slippery slope argument. NBC News has violated an important rule for any news organization. It knowingly presented falsified images as true.
True, the harm it does to viewers is trivial. The party that is harmed is NBC news. If NBC did not issue a disclaimer while showing the images in question, what it tells us is that NBC News is willing to mislead us if in their opinion the viewers are better off believing the falsehoods.
So, if NBC doesn't subscribe to the theory that fictionalized representations of the facts ought to bear a disclaimer, then we must wonder exactly what they think the boundaries of their license to tinker with reality are.
Naturally, I think this is just a stupid gaffe. But if I were in charge of this particular NBC operation, I'd be issuing an apology and promise not to do it again.
Well -- let me try to put the problem to you in a reasonable way.
No, there's nothing wrong with using CGI to goose up an entertainment show. And sports are entertainment. But sports broadcasting isn't just entertainment, it's journalism. If you see film of a fantastic baseball play, you expect you can trust it hasn't been enhanced to make it better. When two rival teams meet, you expect the statitics cited on their past performance are accurate, not ginned up to make things more dramatic.
But of course Sports is still entertainment. They trowel on hyperbole thick and deep. They cherry pick factoids to turn every moment they can into a dramatic story.
And what we're talking about wasn't even a sport event. It was a spectacle.
In the end, it comes down to drawing lines. There's always a line between the inexcusable and the excusable, and things that lay just on either side of the line aren't going to be all that different from each other. It's like the line between night and day, wheresoever you choose to set that line, the moments on either side are hard to distinguish. But if the difference between night and day is important, it's a bad idea to play around with that line -- especially if you aren't up front about it.
Remember, the Olympic broadcast is produced by an NBC News bureau. So an NBC News bureau, if the report is true, has knowingly presented as factual images of things that did not happen. That's a serious thing.
In itself, this little misdeed didn't do any harm, except to one thing: that fuzzy but all important line between the excusable and inexcusable.
In the future, when a campaign presents the news organization with excellent "footage" of their candidate in which protesters have been digitally erased, would it really be that harmful just to put it on? After all, everybody knows that there are people who don't agree with the candidate who would protest if they were allowed to. Let the line erode, and we'll eventually see this, and worse.
Ted Williams, the great Boston Red Sox slugger, had a career high batting average of .344. Only a half dozen batters have have higher career averages. He finished three seasons batting .400 or higher: .400, .406 and .407. One of his gifts was a remarkable ability to judge whether a pitch was going to be in the strike zone. It was remarked once to him that he probably could eke out a few more hits if he swung at pitches just outside the strike zone. After a thinking for a moment, he replied, "But then I wouldn't know where to stop."
Which is kind of my point. The basic skill for any criminal is recognizing situations where he wont' get caught.
My elderly mom was once stuck in her apartment by a jammed deadbolt. She couldn't get the super, and there was no exit, not even a fire escape, only a third floor balcony.
Rather than call the Fire Department, she called me. I came over, and she buzzed me in, then I kicked her front door in (let's say I'm a little bigger than average). It took me two or three tries to break the hinges.
Not a single soul peeked out to see what was going on, or called the cops.
My wife grew up in the suburbs and I grew up in the city. One of her pet peeves is that I tend to leave the doors of our car unlocked when I park. The difference is that I grew up in a neighborhood where some people would smash your windows if they saw anything in it they might want.
Nobody in my neighborhood had fancy car stereos; they either had plain old AM/FM radios, or they had a hole in their dashboard with wires hanging out.
Some of the kids had almost a hacker's attitude towards breaking into cars. Things you left out in your car, in plain view (like a car stereo I guess) were pretty much looked on as abandoned property. But it was the drug addicts to smashed windows. The classier kids didn't do more damage than necessary, unless they decided to take your car for a ride.
I was visiting the old neighborhood once and locked my keys in my car. One of the local kids who was sitting on his front porch asked if I needed help, and I said yes. He disappeared into his apartment and came out with a few tools. He had my car open almost as fast as I could do it with a key, literally in about ten seconds. Didn't leave a scratch on the car, either.
Nice kid. Practically a Boy Scout.
No, you pay for not paying attention.
I think the people who think that surface of the Earth is the interior of a sphere are much more interesting.
For some of them the Universe is a hollow bubble (which I suppose you might say it is, in very rough sense) and the Earth is the interior surface of that bubble. Others have a more conventional cosmology, in which the Earth is a sphere in space -- just a hollow one. Some of those people believe we are living on the inside of the sphere, others that we are (as conventionally believed) on the outside of the sphere, and that the interior and polar regions are inhabited by the Hyperborean race.
Believers in the Hyperborean race tend to be those who give more credence to obscure references in Greek mythology than modern polar expeditions, which you have to admit makes for a higher class of twaddle. It's a pity so many of them are neo-nazis.
There's a lesson here for small application vendors.
You don't make money maximizing the value of the things you sell. You make money maximizing your net margin over all your sales. Of course, everyone knows this, but they don't act like they know it. Salemen running companies are the most prone to thinking gross instead of net.
I once worked for a guy who was really frustrated that people were making money on trivial apps -- ring tones were his pet peeve -- while he was making good apps that did really important things for people, and constantly scrambling to keep his head above water. Well, that's not a coincidence. If you spent $1.99 for a ring tone, you aren't going to call for tech support. If you spent $100,000 for a piece of mission critical software, you jolly well are.
So the real determinant of whether you make money with software that does important things is whether you can turn a profit on support. It's better to forgo new sales than to add features to your product that reduce the profitability of support. It can be counterintuitive in a competitive sales environment to let the other guy pick up sales. The instinct is to match him feature for feature in a death match for who will capture the most sales, but if your product has significant support costs, you have to think of the business more like a consultancy. Efficiency and sustainability matter.
So, if you're looking to make money selling software you develop, you've either got to plan to sell your business to somebody it's more to than the cash flow, or you've got to plan to make money on support.
That's probably why the open source business model has been more successful than people thought it could possibly be. In the end a sustainable software business (leaving aside novelty apps) has to be built around profitable support. Of course sales do matter, but they're only step 1.
I dunno. How many times have we heard, during the discusions of sub $500 laptops, about the archetypal user who "just needs to browse the web"?
Restricting an attack to a sandbox is, of course, a good thing, but it's not much comfort for the users for whom the sandbox is their whole world.
Well, take stack smashing.
It wasn't on anybody's security radar screen until, if I recall, the Morris Worm. So you could have an app that passes all the items on the best security checklist in existence, but if it read input into a local variable without checking the length (as nearly all of us C programmers did, back in the day, and some apparently still do), then your app was wide open.
The discovery of a new class of attack vector can indeed have far-reaching implications, beyond the vendor that's the target of the first practical demonstration.
But it' not an everyday occurrence. It ain't easy to to think up something that is truly new in an area where there is a lot talent working. Mostly, you come up with refinements and insights on what is already known. Richard Feynman discussed this in one of his books, that there was only one point in his entire career where, for a few hours, he knew something about the laws of physics that nobody else did.
So it's probably still just saber rattling, but such a thing could exist.
It's because in a plurality voting system, the stable configuration is for two parties to claim the two large, reasonably contiguous blocks of voters as their base. Then they define the political landscape in terms of an axis drawn between the two blocks, the precise orientation of which is somewhat arbitrary. Finally they build winning coalitions of voters by starting with people in their base, and poaching voters just over the borders of the other party's territory. They do this by (a) pretending to be closer to the center of mass of all voters than they really are, and (b) pretending the other party is further from the center of mass of all voters than they really are.
Destroy the system and let a new one evolve in its place, under the same rules, and you'll get the same configuration. The axis may be drawn slightly differently, but it will function the same.
So, it's not not true that there is not difference between the two parties. There are real differences between the two parties. However these differences don't exhaust the possible ways you could build parties; the exact direction that the "left-right" axis culd be drawn other ways. Furthermore, the parties strive to cover over their real differences when they're in a head to head match up.
George W. Bush illustrate this. He is a candidate who never would be nominated by the Democrats, which right there shows you that there are differences between the parties. He might not have been the best candidate the Republicans could have put up, but that's a different issue. During the election for his first term, Bush sold himself as a "compassionate conservative", which is classic political boundary poaching.
I guess that means that it'd be insensitive if I unveiled my weather control ray on May 2nd.
Maybe the reason is that he actually is more relaxed and comfortable.
Agreed, by I'm not a jump on the bandwagon type; I like to keep one foot firmly grounded in skepticism.
I think that Obama is rare, dually gifted individual. He's got the intellect to be a professor of Constitutional law, but he also has really strong people skills. Of course he's comfortable. Anybody'd be comfortable if their life experience told them they'd be able to outdebate or persuade most people they deal with. People gifted in only one of these ways aren't uncommon, but there's often a gnawing canker of doubt about whether they're on the right track, or can persuade others that they are.
It doesn't make him "qualified" to be president, but those talents will stand him in good stead if he makes it.
I don't think it's quite so simple.
People aren't sheep or parrots, but they do have possess cognitive biases and flaws -- bugs in the epistemological software if you will. One of which is that if you hear the same thing from multiple, apparently independent sources, you will tend to believe it provided you have no prior opinion or more credible source of information to the contrary.
But even though that is a timeworn strategy, it isn't sure fire.
Look at the McCain's forays into attack ads. In part, they've been poorly conceived and timed. The Paris Hilton thing might have worked as the final smack down in a long patient campaign to cut him down to size. But it was over the top. People know campaigns say bad things about the other guy, so you've got to start smaller.
Another factor is who you have to work against. People don't pay much attention to politics until it gets close to the time to vote. Nature abhors a vacuum, and you fill that vacuum with beliefs about the other guy. It worked with Gore and Kerry, but not with Clinton because of Clinton's charismatic personality. As a liberal Democrat, I'm lukewarm on Bill Clinton, in theory at least. Still I remember seeing him interviewed on TV a few years after he was out of office, and being amazed at his almost mesmeric powers of communication.
Reagan was like that too; maybe even more so. You had to really detest the man to be immune to his charm.
Time will tell, but I have an inkling Obama might be another politician of this sort. The McCain campaign is trying to define him, and the pundits are trying to turn him into a cipher, but if you watch him, what comes across is that he is completely comfortable with and utterly sure of who he is. Which doesn't preclude him being a cipher, of course, but that's not the same as being vacuum.
that the McCain campaign hasn't quite adapted to the changes technology has made in politics.
It isn't so much that his campaign lags in exploiting social networking techniques to its advantage. It's more that they haven't grasped the full implications of things like YouTube.
Politicians have always tuned their message to their audience, but in a world of cell phone video cameras and YouTube, your audience is always potentially much greater than the people sitting in front of you. It's important not to actually contradict yourself, and when you get caught contradicting yourself the worst thing you can do is to deny it. The assertion, contradiction and denial make a nice little YouTube vignette. Especially if all three bits are delivered in your trademarked blunt, plainspoken style.
This is probably why the campaign has changed its policy on access. McCain has always be famously accessible to reporters, taking questions for as long as anybody could think of any, spending lot of one on one time. This week they've switched, and now he's only giving scripted statements.
This is more of the same. They're trying to feed their blogosphere partisans the way they feed their mainstream media henchmen, even though (ironically) you have to be a lot more discreet with that sort of thing in the blogosphere.
I'm not saying McCain is necessarily worse than any other politician. Possibly Obama's just a slicker liar. Obama reminds me of Eisenhower, who had the gift of redirecting pointed questions in the direction he wanted the be questioned. For some reason, the television camera simply adores Obama; he's more relaxed and comfortable on camera than Phil Donahue.
But whether or not Obama's the real thing, or the slickest phony in a generation of politicians, McCain has definitely let his ... shall we say strategically tailored representations of the the truth ... show plainly for all to see. This is stuff that would have gone unnoticed ten years ago, or it it was noticed, reported in words rather than shown issuing from the candidate's mouth.
Well, for me the selling point was that DVDs, if handled correctly, play consistently.
A VHS tape in perfect condition in a player in perfect condition has acceptable quality for me. But the tape won't stay in perfect condition even over a moderate number of plays. If the player is dirty it won't play acceptably either.
If you're old enough to remember CDs, that was a big selling point for them over vinyl, although their durability was greatly exaggerated.
Well, there are a vast number of useful programs that could be characterized as filter programs. They take a stream of data, and perhaps a few configuration option, perform the same operation on a sequence of chunks from that stream, and produce an output stream. So much of the useful products of the first thirty or forty years of modern computing fall into this paradigm, that it's embedded in the very conceptual DNA of Unix, along with the pipe. A lot can be done with filter like programs and a staff that has been trained to use them to manage processes.
Things started to change in the 1980s, and but by the year 2000 these mechanisms, while still obviously usable, aren't quite as useful. A basic GUI program looks a lot like an operating system used to look: taking streams of events and routing them to various actors. Information is stored in complex systems such as databases or network services which have both state to be managed and interfaces that are sufficiently rich that they are either a language or bordering on it.
And if GUI prorams are kind of like operating systems used to be, the bits of software we code are marshalled into a common address space and are expected to behave themselves. And between all the things that have been coded by ourselves and others, there is an unlimited number of way we can interact, and even the simplest objects provide a rather rich and often idiosyncratic interface.
The thing about filters is that even a really badly coded filter conforms to an important design criterion: it has a simple, well defined interface.
Programs that would be considered quite simple these days would qualify as systems programs twenty five years ago. And there is much, much, much more detail you must attend to, a great deal of that having to do with arbitrary conventions and limitations of things your stuff has to interface with.
While we've gained a lot, we've lost something too. Programming today is often a lot more tedious than it was back in the day, because you've got so many more details to manage and attend to. Good design is about recapturing what we've lost, which is the ability to work on one aspect of a problem at a time.
language as the focus of a course and I'll show you a trade school.
Well, if you look at the basic, classic RoR demo, that shouldn't be that hard.
90% of the "oh wow" factor of RoR is that it takes care of managing so many niggling organizational, configuration and convention setting details at just the point where you really don't want to be burdened with them, but where other frameworks insist you must.
It's as if the barber you'd been going to all your life starts off every haircut by whacking you on the head with a mallet. Then one day you try a different barber, and you sit down expecting the mallet whack, but instead he just starts cutting your hair. Now your old barber featured stuff like lilac water and pomade and what not, but absence of mallet seems like an extremely significant feature if you've never tried it before.
Well, a couple of years ago I worked for an outfit that was hired by a startup that was going after various pots of government money. They wanted to sell technology to the DoD for, among other things, tracking reconstruction needs and efforts in Iraq.
They didn't have any engineers, so they hired us. The application they were promising cost about 10x what they were willing to pay, so pretty much the understanding was they were getting a model -- not even really a prototype -- of what the application might do. They also built a very impressive data center, even though they didn't have a single IT pro. The conference room where they courted their guests had a large glass wall with motorized shutters that would slide up to reveal the operations center. Normally the ops center was deserted, but they had some recent college grad gofers that they dressed in spiffy uniforms and who had to spend the day in the ops center looking busy when somebody was coming to visit.
They had enough money to do it all for real, but most of that money ended up going into lobbyists, so there was only the bare minimum available to actually develop the technology they were selling. We spent months working closely with them to help them land their first contract. After that we never heard from them again; the last I heard through the brother of one of their employees was that they'd hired the military officer who'd been responsible for helping them get their first contract, although I suspect it might have been through on of the CEO's father-in-law's companies.
So, don't put me in the surprised category.
We'd also looked at going after some homeland security projects ourselves, and what we found out was that the post 9/11 years were the golden age of lobbying. You pretty much needed a lobbyist to get in on the bonanza, and since lobbyists are expensive and make their money from large contracts, those guys with their shell operations center and application pretty much had the right approach if you wanted to succeed.
Ummm... You have to bathe?
It's got to take serious balls to whip something like this up and plug somebody's baby into it, even if the baby was going to die.
would you expect this to happen in a country with "socialized medicine"?