Obviously, he works for an astroturfer hired by Yahoo!
*Laugh* No, that would probably pay better. I actually work for a small software company that's having trouble making payroll this quarter, meaning there's no problem with my taking a little un-paid time to post stories to/. I just did it for the joy of seing my name up in pixels. Or my handle at least.
Sure, it means they want to use the specialists for something, but for what? Would it be so bad if someone organized "grass roots" campaigns that were pro-OSS, pro-net-neutrality, etc. I mean, there are real grass-roots efforts, so even if these guys blew it a little out of proportion, it wouldn't exactly be false.
No. The ends do not justify the means. I happen to run linux on all my machines at the present (*sigh* my BSD box finally went the way netcraft always said it would), but none of my grandparents (all of whom are dead) ever did. If I found out that they were busy writing posthumous letters to our Senator, extolling the Tao of GNU, I'd be just as upset as if it was pro-Microsoft BS.
The people can and should speak for themselves. Letting paid shills shape our public policy is a recipe for disaster, even if we happen to agree with them on the issue of the moment.
Not to mention the links were all about the money coming out of or into the Republican party...
With no bias I might add...;-)
I'll have you know that I spend close to an hour writing the story submission, and pointedly looked for the most non-partisan links I could find. I specifically focused on their corporate activities (with the exception of the Tobin, who I included because of the criminal activity involved).
For the record, I am a Republican, and have been all my life. But I've been an American for even longer, so don't assume that that means I will blindly ignore this sort of thing either just because "Republicans" are doing it. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what color jersey you wear if you are acting to subvert our democracy.
For me, the issue here is simple: these people are good at only one thing, trying to manipulate our elected officials into thinking that they are doing our will when in fact they are not. I assume that their party affiliation is as flexible as their ethics, and don't put any more trust in it than it deserves.
DCI is a full spectrum political consulting, PR, and telemarketing firm; while some of the work it has done certainly has been "astroturfing", a lot of it seems to be routine political consulting and marketing.
They sure are. As they put it themselves "Whatever the issue, whatever the target--elected officials, regulators or public opinion--you need reliable third party allies to advocate your cause. We can help you recruit credible coalition partners and engage them for maximum impact. It's what we do best." The services they provide include:
The submission seems to say "Google may do something evil in the future, let's start the backlash now so it's over with".
Wake me up when there's something real.
You can wake up now. Google actually did something; they hired an astroturfing company.
They may not have known that's what it was; I'm still holding out hope that some new hire did this as his or her "career limiting move" and tomorrow we will here about them firing DCI without ever using their services. But they actually did it.
The point is, our best chance to act is now, before they go too far down that path. Although it may be hard to resist the dark side, it's a heck of a lot easier to resist than escape. And the best way to help someone resist is to turn the light on, bright. Going to sleep while your roommate looks over contract proposals from the devil (because nothing bad has actually happened yet) is not a survival trait.
Perhaps Google is just trying to balance out their lobbying efforts?
When you start handing out money to both sides of the aisle, you can get better results.
IIRC, Google was mostly throwing money at Democratic party people.
This is an interesting take on the issue. In submitting the story, I intentionally focused on the part I object to (DCI's long history of unethical conduct) and did not mention either party by name. But, as you point out, there seems to be a sad assumption underlying this story (and reflected in many of the news reports about it) -- that the only way to gain influence with the Republicans at present is through corruption.
Think about it...Google hires a corrupt astroturfing firm, and your immediate response is that they are trying to balance out their lobbying efforts--that the way to balance out giving to Democrats is to give to Slimeballs too. I'm not saying that you originated this take on it; it seems to be pretty much universal.
Just because you hire a firm known to have pulled dirty tricks for dirty companies like Exxon and Microsoft doesn't mean that they'll necessarily pull dirty stuff on behalf of all their clients.
This is a little disingenuous. Direct Connect is an astroturfing company; that's what their people are good at. They make things (like the Microsoft letters, or the Swiftboat ads, etc.) that are specifically designed to look like they are coming "from the people" when they in fact are not. While they have many ways of going about it, it seems to be the only service they provide.
If someone hires a high-priced specialist, it seems reasonable to assume that they want the specialist's services, doesn't it?
--MarkusQ
P.S. For the record, I like Google. A lot. I used it to dig up most the links in the story. But that doesn't mean that I blindly trust them and everyone who works for them, or want to possibly sit quietly by while some quislings pervert them from within. It is much easier to keep a basically honest company honest then to bring one back from the dark side once they've gone over.
In some ways, I think we are close to agreeing (at least, I share your reaction to ASP and VBScript, and also used to assume that strongly typed languages had to be statically typed).
But in other ways I think we are talking past each other. A few of the places I think we may still disagree:
While we both can see that redundancy can help catch errors, I also maintain that it can cause errors--or at least, hide them. We might, for example, have a language that reduced the chance of numeric constants being mistyped by requiring them to be specified in English as well, and require that the type of a variable be specified with each use as is done in some contexts (e.g. checks):
float::cost:= 57.34(Fifty seven point thirty four)
While this would reduce the chance of some types of errors it is my contention that it would make others, such as logic errors, harder to find--if only because the more bloat you have, the more places there are for bugs to hide.
I don't think the "scripting language" distinction is useful. Is Smalltalk a scripting language? How about Prolog? Or Java? What about Erlang? How in the heck can you say, in any meaningful way? Rather than comparing languages by first categorizing them based on some set of features and then assuming that they share all the other properties of the categories, it is much more useful to compare the languages themselves.
In each of the examples we have traded back and forth, I note that your example is not only longer and dependent on specific extensions to the language but significantly less flexible as well. My first example performed a series of operations, you countered with a longer example that just performed one step. I replied with an example that tested for 1) a specific value in one field, 2) an arbitrary function of the value in another, and 3) called a method of the object to let it "test itself"; you responded with a longer example that performed a small subset of this, and indicated that it could only be as short as it was if there were additional changes to the library. (BTW, I'm ignoring the number/length of lines argument as a red herring).
Another example of the way in which dynamically typed languages can help prevent bugs is the reuse of code. Rather than having to rewrite library routines (or force object into an inheritance hierarchy) just to get a certain feature, languages like Ruby make it easy to write library routines that only depend on the features of objects they actually need. Thus if I am writing a statistics package, I might only care about the certain aspects of the data (which of two values is "greater than" the other or how "far apart" they are in some sense). Instead of saying that this library deals with doubles, or smallints, or whatever, I can write something that accepts any data that provides the interface I need.
That means I won't have a half dozen differently specialized versions floating around, some having one bug fixed, some having another bug fixed...
Dynamically typed languages can free you from a whole host of bugs that arise specifically because you have to decide on the type of your data rather than letting the language do it for you. Strings and arrays that overflow their bounds, integers that get out of range, inexact fractions, etc. all result from you preallocating the storage--in many cases, by guess, habit, or unjustified assumption. These problems simply don't occur in a language like Ruby. I can increment a counter until I die of old age without worrying about it overflowing the integer range--overflows are caught, and the number is promoted to a larger integer type, without loss of information.
But other than these sorts of points, I suspect we share the same goals and (on a large range of issues implied but not discussed by this thread) the same sensibilities.
I'm going to assume that means Ruby is not type safe and more akin to script.
Ruby is type safe, but not statically typed. And it's polymorphic, which further complicates the question.
But the point of the post to which I was responding was doing "script like things" (e.g. Perl-like) in Ruby, so yes, the example I gave was scripting language-like.
And I disagree with you about what is or isn't harder to read. Your example, at eight lines, appears to do what in Ruby would be one line:
The extra lines are all administrative overhead, and don't have anything to do with what you are trying to accomplish. In fact they obscure some of the interesting details, such as where the items being searched are coming from (at least, I can't tell were they're coming from from looking at this code). In the ruby version, the data is coming from the object "my_data", as should be obvious.
And finally, the Ruby version is much more general; if we needed to change it to find items by more complex criteria, the changes are trivial:
results = my_data.find_all { |item| item.my_property == 'someVal' and (item.half_life > 60.seconds or item.tastes_sweet?)}
I imagine that the analogous changes to your code would be...bulky.
I consider myself to be a responsible computer user and would never deliberately "hack" into someones website. In ordinary HTML, isn't chopping off the the end of the URL a normal alternative way to move back to a higher level by making the higher level default index.html page appear. If no index.html page exists then sometimes the contents of a directory are displayed instead and the appropiate looking HTML file can the selected from the list of files instead. Isn't that just a obvious normal alternative way to get around websites?
Yes, it's perfectly normal. That's what makes this accusation so absurd. Some browsers even have a button that does just what you are describing (generally, up near the "Back" button, but with the arrow pointing up instead of to the left). Why something that can be done with a click of a button (or, as you point out, by a few keystrokes in a textbox explicitly provided for that purpose) is considered "hacking" is beyond me.
In this case, someone was convicted under the relevant legislation, for appending "../.." to a URL to gain "unauthorised access".
The key difference being that this person was exploiting a bug in the way the server parses URLs, rather than just entering a valid URL and getting a response. There's a big difference between exploiting a bug to get around existing security and using something correctly in the absence of any attempt at security.
I'm sorry, this is not "Hacking," it's the way the web works. They sent the web server a URL, requesting a document, and the web server gave it to them. They didn't do anything nefarious, underhanded, or tricky. The didn't claim to be anybody they weren't, there was no phishing or pretexting or anything like that involved.
I don't know how you can be so supportive of this activity as it's a dangerous and unclear line to take. Exactly what separates this from an SQL injection attack or spoofing a session ID within a URL? Afterall, you're just sending the webserver a URL/packets, how it responds is their problem, right? I don't think so. It's not like they were just choosing URLs at random. Even if the accused did the most basic form of this attack (i.e. server directory listings), they were still intentionally using URLs designed to trick the server into giving them access to material they knew they weren't authorized to access.
The difference, as I stated, is that they were using the system the way it was designed to work. The whole reason browsers have address bars is so that you can type in URLs. The reason web servers respond with a list of the files in a directory is so that users can type in a partial URL and get a comprehensible list of alternatives to choose from.
Spoofing, SQL injection, etc. involve using things in ways that they were never intended to be used, breaking them in order to get access to something that the system was designed to prevent access to. It is the exact opposite of what happened here.
And as for your final point, how are they supposed to know that they aren't supposed to have access to something, when it is made available to them using the basic public interface as it was designed to be used, and none of the dozen or so ways to prevent them from gaining access were used? That seems to me to be a much more dangerous precedent, since you could retroactively criminalize almost any use of a web site by saying "Well, you should have known that you weren't supposed to look at that page!" and suddenly you've made somebody into a cyberterrorist by fiat.
I'm sorry, this is not "Hacking," it's the way the web works. They sent the web server a URL, requesting a document, and the web server gave it to them. They didn't do anything nefarious, underhanded, or tricky. The didn't claim to be anybody they weren't, there was no phishing or pretexting or anything like that involved.
Imagine they had called the governor's office and said "Hi, got anything incriminating about the guv on file?" and when told "Sure, would you like a copy?" they said "Yes please!" What would people think then? It's the same darned situation here.
The American system is specifically designed to not require a majority vote to win a Presidential election so while the good and bad points of the Electoral Collage can be debated from now till the end of time, those were the rules in place in 2000 and you got the President that the rules dictated you'd get.
If it makes you feel any better no matter what how bad of a Democratic nominee they can dig up (and honestly, was Kerry the best they could find last time round) there is no chance of Bush win in 2008.
I wouldn't be so sure. The really disgusting thing about Florida 2000 is that Gore would have won the electoral vote as well if the recount had been conducted according to the laws in effect at the time. But no one knew that then, and both sides got busy gaming the system. Team Gore, specifically, by trying to limit the recount to precincts that they thought would help their guy, going nuts with the standards, assuming that the loss of felons hurt him more than the loss of military ballots (way to show how much you believe in your candidate guys!) and other nonsense, effectively gave the race away.
If they'd just stuck with insisting that the laws be followed, Gore would have won.
So I don't know, if the DLC and their ilk haven't accidentally choked themselves trying to find their butts in a dark room they may still somehow find a way to lose to Bush in 2008.
Depends on how you define harder. I have a custom DAL i created which makes searching as easy as your example. Its a few more lines of code to create the objects and set the desired values / operators, but its not 'harder' by any stretch.
"Harder" may be a bit of a stretch, I'll admit. The thing I like about Ruby is how easy it is to do things like this "on the fly," without a lot of clutter for "creating objects" and "setting parameters"; it isn't that the other way is harder to write per se, but that the total effort (thinking it up, typing, reading it later, and figuring out what it does) seems to be less. But it's a cumulative thing, an effect you can really feel as you're working even when the individual steps aren't that much harder.
Suppose you want to find the last names of people in your address book who might be Vulcans, and produce a list ordered by the length of their name (five character names, then four and six character names, then the rest, alphabetized within length groups
Perhaps they are. For instance, I find it jarring when someone who is called on a factual error in their post says "I know that. But that doesn't stop the fact..." and repeats the same incorrect claim that they were just called on. And I suspect that my bias against this sort of thing shows. I have a bias against people who try to paint a picture that is fundamentally untrue with malicious intent. And I have a bias against people who spew talk radio talking points.
If that's what you're accusing me of, I plead guilty as charged.
And what the fuck does Rush have to do with my post?
Apart from stylistic similarities, perhaps nothing. But I note that you once again managed to avoid addressing the point that your earlier claims are demonstrably false, and started acting outraged instead.
When I point out that what you said was incorrect you reply "I know that" and then reassert the same false claim in different words.
The different words include (twice, in under two dozen words) the phrase "the Democrat Party" which Rush Limbaugh endorses as a way of expressing his belief "that the party has nothing to do with democracy".
You respond to my second point with a second lie (or, to be charitable a bald-faced unsupported claim which turns out to be factually inaccurate), that Leiberman is one of the most liberal Senators in office, even though this has nothing to do with the point you are rebutting or with the basis on which you are rebutting it. But it has been a canard or right-wing talk radio for years, so in it goes.
You turn around and conflate any disagreement with Lieberman or his positions with "Hatred for Bush", another of Rush's talking points which, when you think about it, makes no sense.
You conclude by bundling one state's Senate race into the Bush crew's "you're either with us or against us" thought-stopper, which gets dragged out to "explain" everything from global war to local school board elections...but only when looking at the facts and honestly thinking about them would lead you to a different conclusion.
By the same logic, you could argue that cars will never replace trains, MP3s will never displace CDs, and so forth.
Bottled water? Not a chance! Creeks and brooks not only come pre-installed in most landscapes but they also have an insurmountable first mover advantage, greater mind share, and a more "intuitive" user interface. Sure, a few special-needs groups will drink out of canteens that they fill themselves, but it will never catch on with the general public.
And don't even get me started on the whole "forks and spoons" fad.
It's tempting to think that all Democrats will vote how their Democrat masters tell them to, but Connecticut voters are more mature than that. I suspect at least a third of them will vote for Leiberman.
I'll assume that you weren't following the campaign closely, and aren't just trolling, but that is pretty much exactly wrong. The party bosses opposed Lamont from the start, not wanting to spend resources on Lieberman's "safe" seat. It was the grass roots that kept pushing for a candidate that represented the views of the people. The party only got behind him (to the extent that they have) reluctantly and well after he won the supposedly unwinable primary.
Single issue candidates always do better in primaries than in general elections. Which is why Lamont will probably lose. Leiberman is more solidly liberal than Lamont, and Connecticut is a liberal state. Do the math.
Again, I'll assume that you aren't just trolling, but this is plain nuts. First, it isn't a single issue race (which issue were you thinking, anyway? Reproductive rights? The war? Big pharma vs. the consumer? Lobbyist reform? Immigration? Ethics?). But regardless of which issue you pick, if you look at Lieberman's actions (and ignore is posturing) he's hardly a liberal, and not at all in step with the bulk of the voters (of all flavors) that he supposedly represents. Finally, is big problem is really that he long ago stopped having anything to do with his district, and became a "national politician" who only wanted them as a backdrop for his leap to higher office (which he has repeatedly failed to grasp).
They are, to put it bluntly, fed up with being used.
Well, Lieberman leading Lamont 49-41 means the Republican candidate (which almost nobody, including Republican leaders, is even acknowledging exists) is getting at most 10% of the vote. I'd say that's a pretty strong Democrat state.
The reason the Republicans aren't admitting that "their candidate" exists is that they're funding Lieberman; in effect, he is their candidate. After all, he was already voting with them when it mattered (and making a big showing of opposing them when it didn't).
It just means it will take students five years to pass each grade and most of the stuff they were supposed to learn will have been cut out of the ciriculum.
Maybe--or at least I can see how you could look at it that way, based on their product management style.
But my (admittedly limited) exposure to their general management style has been that they are exceptionally us-vs-them oriented. The normal NIH responses ("It wasn't invented here, so we won't use it") are replaced with much more aggressive versions ("It wasn't invented here, so it must be assimilated, destroyed, or both."). They have almost no sense of belonging to a larger community (Paul Allen excepted, but he's long gone), and they tend to see (or at least portray) everything in simplistic "you're either with us or against us--and if you are against us, you must die" terms.
As a co-worker once put it, they think like a street gang with MBAs.
And I'm not sure that teaching high school kids to think that way is such a good idea.
also a learning process modeled on Microsoft's management techniques
Maybe I've watched too many B movies, but I've got a bad feeling about this. I can't quite put my finger on it...something about creating monsters maybe?
My post was a test of a new form of communication that we've been trying out over here (called a "joke" or "jest"). It aims to amuse, but at the occasional cost of some technical accuracy.
First FreeDos 1.0, and now this. If I go to bed now, I'm sure to miss the story I'm really waiting for; just think of it, Babbage's Analytical Engine, completed at last! Will it work the way he thought?
Slashdot Mirror
*Laugh* No, that would probably pay better. I actually work for a small software company that's having trouble making payroll this quarter, meaning there's no problem with my taking a little un-paid time to post stories to /. I just did it for the joy of seing my name up in pixels. Or my handle at least.
--MarkusQ
No. The ends do not justify the means. I happen to run linux on all my machines at the present (*sigh* my BSD box finally went the way netcraft always said it would), but none of my grandparents (all of whom are dead) ever did. If I found out that they were busy writing posthumous letters to our Senator, extolling the Tao of GNU, I'd be just as upset as if it was pro-Microsoft BS.
The people can and should speak for themselves. Letting paid shills shape our public policy is a recipe for disaster, even if we happen to agree with them on the issue of the moment.
--MarkusQ
I'll have you know that I spend close to an hour writing the story submission, and pointedly looked for the most non-partisan links I could find. I specifically focused on their corporate activities (with the exception of the Tobin, who I included because of the criminal activity involved).
For the record, I am a Republican, and have been all my life. But I've been an American for even longer, so don't assume that that means I will blindly ignore this sort of thing either just because "Republicans" are doing it. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what color jersey you wear if you are acting to subvert our democracy.
For me, the issue here is simple: these people are good at only one thing, trying to manipulate our elected officials into thinking that they are doing our will when in fact they are not. I assume that their party affiliation is as flexible as their ethics, and don't put any more trust in it than it deserves.
--MarkusQ
They sure are. As they put it themselves "Whatever the issue, whatever the target--elected officials, regulators or public opinion--you need reliable third party allies to advocate your cause. We can help you recruit credible coalition partners and engage them for maximum impact. It's what we do best." The services they provide include:
What they don't seem to do is anything legitimate, or at least non-slimy. Got any examples you'd like to share?
--MarkusQ
You can wake up now. Google actually did something; they hired an astroturfing company.
They may not have known that's what it was; I'm still holding out hope that some new hire did this as his or her "career limiting move" and tomorrow we will here about them firing DCI without ever using their services. But they actually did it.
The point is, our best chance to act is now, before they go too far down that path. Although it may be hard to resist the dark side, it's a heck of a lot easier to resist than escape. And the best way to help someone resist is to turn the light on, bright. Going to sleep while your roommate looks over contract proposals from the devil (because nothing bad has actually happened yet) is not a survival trait.
--MarkusQ
This is an interesting take on the issue. In submitting the story, I intentionally focused on the part I object to (DCI's long history of unethical conduct) and did not mention either party by name. But, as you point out, there seems to be a sad assumption underlying this story (and reflected in many of the news reports about it) -- that the only way to gain influence with the Republicans at present is through corruption.
Think about it...Google hires a corrupt astroturfing firm, and your immediate response is that they are trying to balance out their lobbying efforts--that the way to balance out giving to Democrats is to give to Slimeballs too. I'm not saying that you originated this take on it; it seems to be pretty much universal.
--MarkusQ
This is a little disingenuous. Direct Connect is an astroturfing company; that's what their people are good at. They make things (like the Microsoft letters, or the Swiftboat ads, etc.) that are specifically designed to look like they are coming "from the people" when they in fact are not. While they have many ways of going about it, it seems to be the only service they provide.
If someone hires a high-priced specialist, it seems reasonable to assume that they want the specialist's services, doesn't it?
--MarkusQ
P.S. For the record, I like Google. A lot. I used it to dig up most the links in the story. But that doesn't mean that I blindly trust them and everyone who works for them, or want to possibly sit quietly by while some quislings pervert them from within. It is much easier to keep a basically honest company honest then to bring one back from the dark side once they've gone over.
In some ways, I think we are close to agreeing (at least, I share your reaction to ASP and VBScript, and also used to assume that strongly typed languages had to be statically typed).
But in other ways I think we are talking past each other. A few of the places I think we may still disagree:
That means I won't have a half dozen differently specialized versions floating around, some having one bug fixed, some having another bug fixed...
But other than these sorts of points, I suspect we share the same goals and (on a large range of issues implied but not discussed by this thread) the same sensibilities.
--MarkusQ
Ruby is type safe, but not statically typed. And it's polymorphic, which further complicates the question.
But the point of the post to which I was responding was doing "script like things" (e.g. Perl-like) in Ruby, so yes, the example I gave was scripting language-like.
And I disagree with you about what is or isn't harder to read. Your example, at eight lines, appears to do what in Ruby would be one line:
The extra lines are all administrative overhead, and don't have anything to do with what you are trying to accomplish. In fact they obscure some of the interesting details, such as where the items being searched are coming from (at least, I can't tell were they're coming from from looking at this code). In the ruby version, the data is coming from the object "my_data", as should be obvious.
And finally, the Ruby version is much more general; if we needed to change it to find items by more complex criteria, the changes are trivial:
I imagine that the analogous changes to your code would be...bulky.
MarkusQ
Yes, it's perfectly normal. That's what makes this accusation so absurd. Some browsers even have a button that does just what you are describing (generally, up near the "Back" button, but with the arrow pointing up instead of to the left). Why something that can be done with a click of a button (or, as you point out, by a few keystrokes in a textbox explicitly provided for that purpose) is considered "hacking" is beyond me.
--MarkusQ
The key difference being that this person was exploiting a bug in the way the server parses URLs, rather than just entering a valid URL and getting a response. There's a big difference between exploiting a bug to get around existing security and using something correctly in the absence of any attempt at security.
--MarkusQ
The difference, as I stated, is that they were using the system the way it was designed to work. The whole reason browsers have address bars is so that you can type in URLs. The reason web servers respond with a list of the files in a directory is so that users can type in a partial URL and get a comprehensible list of alternatives to choose from.
Spoofing, SQL injection, etc. involve using things in ways that they were never intended to be used, breaking them in order to get access to something that the system was designed to prevent access to. It is the exact opposite of what happened here.
And as for your final point, how are they supposed to know that they aren't supposed to have access to something, when it is made available to them using the basic public interface as it was designed to be used, and none of the dozen or so ways to prevent them from gaining access were used? That seems to me to be a much more dangerous precedent, since you could retroactively criminalize almost any use of a web site by saying "Well, you should have known that you weren't supposed to look at that page!" and suddenly you've made somebody into a cyberterrorist by fiat.
--MarkusQ
I'm sorry, this is not "Hacking," it's the way the web works. They sent the web server a URL, requesting a document, and the web server gave it to them. They didn't do anything nefarious, underhanded, or tricky. The didn't claim to be anybody they weren't, there was no phishing or pretexting or anything like that involved.
Imagine they had called the governor's office and said "Hi, got anything incriminating about the guv on file?" and when told "Sure, would you like a copy?" they said "Yes please!" What would people think then? It's the same darned situation here.
--MarkusQ
I wouldn't be so sure. The really disgusting thing about Florida 2000 is that Gore would have won the electoral vote as well if the recount had been conducted according to the laws in effect at the time. But no one knew that then, and both sides got busy gaming the system. Team Gore, specifically, by trying to limit the recount to precincts that they thought would help their guy, going nuts with the standards, assuming that the loss of felons hurt him more than the loss of military ballots (way to show how much you believe in your candidate guys!) and other nonsense, effectively gave the race away.
If they'd just stuck with insisting that the laws be followed, Gore would have won.
So I don't know, if the DLC and their ilk haven't accidentally choked themselves trying to find their butts in a dark room they may still somehow find a way to lose to Bush in 2008.
--MarkusQ
"Harder" may be a bit of a stretch, I'll admit. The thing I like about Ruby is how easy it is to do things like this "on the fly," without a lot of clutter for "creating objects" and "setting parameters"; it isn't that the other way is harder to write per se, but that the total effort (thinking it up, typing, reading it later, and figuring out what it does) seems to be less. But it's a cumulative thing, an effect you can really feel as you're working even when the individual steps aren't that much harder.
--MarkusQ
Suppose you want to find the last names of people in your address book who might be Vulcans, and produce a list ordered by the length of their name (five character names, then four and six character names, then the rest, alphabetized within length groups
address_book. /.*k$/ }.
collect { |person| person.last_name }.
find_all { |name| (3..8).include? name.length and name =~
sort_by {|name| [[2 2 2 2 1 0 1 2 2][name.length],name] }
I'm not sure, but I think this would be harder in C#.
--MarkusQ
Perhaps they are. For instance, I find it jarring when someone who is called on a factual error in their post says "I know that. But that doesn't stop the fact..." and repeats the same incorrect claim that they were just called on. And I suspect that my bias against this sort of thing shows. I have a bias against people who try to paint a picture that is fundamentally untrue with malicious intent. And I have a bias against people who spew talk radio talking points.
If that's what you're accusing me of, I plead guilty as charged.
Apart from stylistic similarities, perhaps nothing. But I note that you once again managed to avoid addressing the point that your earlier claims are demonstrably false, and started acting outraged instead.
--MarkusQ
Your biases are showing.
--MarkusQ
By the same logic, you could argue that cars will never replace trains, MP3s will never displace CDs, and so forth.
Bottled water? Not a chance! Creeks and brooks not only come pre-installed in most landscapes but they also have an insurmountable first mover advantage, greater mind share, and a more "intuitive" user interface. Sure, a few special-needs groups will drink out of canteens that they fill themselves, but it will never catch on with the general public.
And don't even get me started on the whole "forks and spoons" fad.
--MarkusQ
I'll assume that you weren't following the campaign closely, and aren't just trolling, but that is pretty much exactly wrong. The party bosses opposed Lamont from the start, not wanting to spend resources on Lieberman's "safe" seat. It was the grass roots that kept pushing for a candidate that represented the views of the people. The party only got behind him (to the extent that they have) reluctantly and well after he won the supposedly unwinable primary.
Again, I'll assume that you aren't just trolling, but this is plain nuts. First, it isn't a single issue race (which issue were you thinking, anyway? Reproductive rights? The war? Big pharma vs. the consumer? Lobbyist reform? Immigration? Ethics?). But regardless of which issue you pick, if you look at Lieberman's actions (and ignore is posturing) he's hardly a liberal, and not at all in step with the bulk of the voters (of all flavors) that he supposedly represents. Finally, is big problem is really that he long ago stopped having anything to do with his district, and became a "national politician" who only wanted them as a backdrop for his leap to higher office (which he has repeatedly failed to grasp).
They are, to put it bluntly, fed up with being used.
--MarkusQ
The reason the Republicans aren't admitting that "their candidate" exists is that they're funding Lieberman; in effect, he is their candidate. After all, he was already voting with them when it mattered (and making a big showing of opposing them when it didn't).
--MarkusQ
Maybe--or at least I can see how you could look at it that way, based on their product management style.
But my (admittedly limited) exposure to their general management style has been that they are exceptionally us-vs-them oriented. The normal NIH responses ("It wasn't invented here, so we won't use it") are replaced with much more aggressive versions ("It wasn't invented here, so it must be assimilated, destroyed, or both."). They have almost no sense of belonging to a larger community (Paul Allen excepted, but he's long gone), and they tend to see (or at least portray) everything in simplistic "you're either with us or against us--and if you are against us, you must die" terms.
As a co-worker once put it, they think like a street gang with MBAs.
And I'm not sure that teaching high school kids to think that way is such a good idea.
--MarkusQ
Maybe I've watched too many B movies, but I've got a bad feeling about this. I can't quite put my finger on it...something about creating monsters maybe?
--MarkusQ
Yes, I know.
My post was a test of a new form of communication that we've been trying out over here (called a "joke" or "jest"). It aims to amuse, but at the occasional cost of some technical accuracy.
Hope that helps.
--MarkusQ
Great, now I'll never get to sleep.
First FreeDos 1.0, and now this. If I go to bed now, I'm sure to miss the story I'm really waiting for; just think of it, Babbage's Analytical Engine, completed at last! Will it work the way he thought?
The suspense is killing me.
--MarkusQ