Microsoft really does have one of the very few pure research groups left in computer science.
I am not an MS fanboi by any means, but I have to agree here. It is becoming very hard to find CS research groups doing really innovative research anymore, even in academia. DoD and NSF funding for pure CS and computational systems has, for the most part, dried up, having been diverted towards biological and weapon-oriented endeavors. The only real funding in CS is in data-mining, "autonomous vehicles", and other areas where the likely outcome is increased kill-rates - with a few bones tossed to large-scale simulation. And certainly no funding in OS and programming language technology large enough to do more than (very) small-scale experiments.
And this is sad, because the state of software has not actually improved since around 1980. We're still stepping through for-loops with debuggers rather than building workable functional and proof-based systems; symbolic AI has been killed off, leaving stochastic models with no ability to explain their conclusions; GUI's, multi-touch excepted, have not changed since then. All else is simply repackaging of old technology.
And it's a shame. Back in the seventies, there were dozens of industrial R&D labs that studied software - even medium-sized companies employing as few as a thousand people often had labs. Now we're down to about a half dozen in the US (most of who are R&D in name only - so heavily weighted towards the "D" that they are). And our research seed-corn is drying up. Fancy that... Thanks MBA's and quarterly outcome investors. You've all really helped here, together with Congress-people who, if something doesn't kill someone, don't think it merits funding. Don't worry, though. I'm sure you'll all still be OK in twenty years when we've lost all of our "innovation" because of lack of basic research to build on. It's just the rest of us little people who'll have to pay through the nose for technology that's developed in places where governments and companies still understand that funding research is worthwhile. Or maybe we'll just get lucky and hit a long global decline in new technology - I've always liked to think that that's how we'll get to the next Dark Ages.
So blessings be on Microsoft and all of the companies that still fund research. They are the few pinpricks of light glowing in an increasingly darkening sky.
I have no problem with his synths - they sound great. I've used them in a lot of my music. I just wish he'd get back to doing what he's good at - making interesting and useful things. Note that I don't believe that crackpottery about the future is a particularly useful thing.
No, we dislike his nuttery because it moves attention from the achievable to the non-achievable. In addition, he makes it sound to many powerful people who have control of funding projects that what he espouses is inevitable, giving them cover to defund projects that may actually benefit mankind because, if the singularity is around the corner, why should they fund anything... In short, Ray is a crackpot who does more harm than good, sort of like a fundamentalist preacher whose minions may do good in a small way (e.g., not killing people - something that they were unlikely to do anyway) but do evil in larger ways every day.
If Ray really wants to help, he should quit the crap and get back to what he was good at - inventing useful things.
I was a singlularity denier, for one thing. But I have to reverse myself and admit that I'm wrong... Try living without today's technology and internet and see how far you get.
Many folks live "off the grid" and have no problem doing so. You had better hope that mankind is not as inflexible as you say, because computer technology is relatively brittle and a catastrophe that brings down the internet (and, according to you, civilization and Ray's vaunted singularity with it) is not that implausible.
Ray takes a lot of flak but he deserves respect, even when you think he's wrong.
Horse. Shit.
Ray is a hack that spouts inexact and mainly non-confirmable crap who deserves about as much respect as Nostradamus. Maybe he can get a show on The "History" Channel, together with the ghosts and aliens who seem to live there with Nostradamus...
The Pentagon and other agencies are looking at ways to tighten security, promising increased internal auditing and banning the ability of systems containing classified information to connect to thumb drives or other removable media.
The more you tighten your grip, Gates and Clinton, the more memos will slip through your fingers...
USB and Firewire both hook to realaudiointerfaceunits well enough, although, if you want to go highend, you might still want to use a PCI interface card.
Ever crossed your mind that the number of people who have certain level of talent and skill level are limited?
Yes, but the fact that average salaries have not budged in the past twenty years (not to mention not zooming up to the $1M level you gave your outlandish straw man) shows that we are nowhere near that limit at the present time. Plus, before that point occurs, companies would also start training internally - something else not seen. Why do you cry so loudly to defend the broken status quo?
Is anyone else tired of these "copy the press release" stories? I saw this in the paper, I heard it on NPR. Really? This is news? Anyone who wants the tunes of the Beatles on their iPod has, by now, either ripped them from CD or downloaded the MP3s illegally or is too stupid to survive. Do we really need this joint marketing missive from Apple (Corps and Computer) trumpeted to the world when it's just drumming up business for two mega-corps and (the heirs of) some very wealthy musicians?
And, in the end, who really gives a crap? I've been listening to music for the past forty-plus years. I remember when my older sister bought "Meet the Beatles" and played it ceaselessly for weeks. I liked it. It was good music. They continued to make good music through the early seventies. But that was then. Believe it or not, there have been a lot of people making music since then that is just as good (if not better). By burying yourself in the past, you hold back the future. Move on, people.
Actually, not so much. If you were convicted of murder back in that day, you were hung - and they didn't wait about long for appeals. The crimes of most of the people sent to Australia were quite mundane and driven by poverty with petty theft being one of the main crimes of the people sentenced to this fate.
MS Kin is like a 60 year old fat dominatrix. Not much going on there, and just trying to play the game because she heard the young'uns were having fun with it.
That contradicts the idea that God does not deceive, which most Christians believe.
I'd say that Job would probably disagree with you. In the Old Testament, God often deceives in the short term to "test faith" (See also Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac), something which, if for which you want to give Him/Her/It a pass because it wasn't a long-term thing, seems to make Him/Her/It a dick (not to mention really, really insecure about everyone believing in/loving Him/Her/It, too). If I had to believe in a god, I'd rather have it be one that wasn't a dick.
If you believe someone can become a suicide terrorist without religion, then you really don't understand people... or religion.
I'm not religious myself, but I can see some scenarios where I might be willing to sacrifice myself for totally non-religious reasons. Here's one... My city is attacked by a hoard of ravenous zombies. By drawing them out into an uninhabited region with a plate full of brains and detonating a nuclear device, killing myself in the process, I can save my people from the zombie hoard, be remembered as the savior of humanity for the next thousand-plus years, and die knowing that I've done A Good Thing (TM). No religion is involved here and most people would do it to "save the world".
The general point is that, in some cases, people will give their lives to save others, religion notwithstanding. Now, this usually happens for political reasons - people are often willing to sacrifice to throw off a (perceived) oppressor. In reality, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and beyond have very little to do with religion - they are simply the continuation of politics by other means (my apologies to von Clausewitz) - and they would occur even if there was no religion because the people who foment these actions simply see this as war. The religion thing just makes it easier to recruit volunteers. But don't assume you couldn't do the same thing by appealing to someone's sense of justice or patriotism instead.
... mainly because they are both nuclear powers, so we are going to do everything we can to make nice with both of them at every opportunity.
Why? It's not like they'd be lobbing their nukes at us. And once they were done lobbing their nukes at each other, it's not like they'd be in much of a position to lob any more.
A very astute set of observations, showing that the poster of the above actually understands this aspect of agile development. However, you are incorrect about one thing: That's why managers hate "people over process" and why Agile IT gets loaded down with more process: resources are so much easier to manage than people.
As a manager, I disagree - this mindset might be true among some managers, but not all of us. I find people a lot easier to manage if you treat them as people and not as resources. In fact, assuming you've done your hiring and training correctly, most teams end up being "self managing" after a while with the only thing you need to deal with are occasional corrections and helping to set priorities (and, of course, managing your team's face to the rest of the organization, getting physical resources, etc.). That's a lot easier than having to go over a bunch of paper each day making sure that every "i" is dotted and every "t" is crossed for some arbitrary process. However, it does make it more critical to hire the right people - look for flexibility and intelligence rather than for a code monkey and you'll be on the right track. And, I'll almost always take a generalist over a specialist. That being said, I wouldn't pass on process in some places - but, thankfully, most of us are not working in avionics, health care devices, or nuclear power station control systems (to name a few).
From that experience what Agile means for me is TOTAL lack of Q&A.
Given your own lack of QA (Quality Assurance) in your post, I would see where this would be a tragedy, as you obviously need an external source monitoring your work.
For your information:
QA = Quality Assurance (sometimes, Quality Assessment) - a process by which quality of a product is assessed (so it can be remediated) or assured before a product is shipped.
Q&A = Question and Answer - a period during or after a talk and/or interview where questions can be asked and, hopefully, answered.
I hope this helps end your debasement of the English language.
The marketing idiot walks in and wants feature X added like yesterday since he will be doing a demo day after tomorrow and it simply has to be there because he saw it on a competitors product. Programming Manager fearing for his job desperately Googles like a madman looking for feature X and finds it in a 100,000 line framework and tells the troops to "Put it in" since even if they dropped EVERYTHING and ALL the programmers immediately started trying to implements feature X it would take a month to do it right. In doing so, they implement feature X and introduce 30 more critical bugs which now have to be tracked down in code that no one in the shop is familiar with and have bloated their code base by 50% because they are "Agile".
And this is not "agile" - this is uncontrolled chaos. But go ahead - tell me how a strict requirements document would protect you from this. Either the marketing idiot has enough power over your development manager to make him dance like a monkey or he doesn't. A magic set of requirements or design documents won't change this. But then programmers usually are a superstitious lot, anyway, assuming that their paper talismans will protect them. And anyway, it gives them more justification for their ineffective whining.
And, in case you were wondering (which you aren't because you've already made up your mind about lightweight processes), the proper response of the development manager would be to tell the marketing idiot that this would go into the next sprint/iteration/whatever. It's a win-win where the marketing idiot doesn't have to wait for an entire release for his latest brain fart and your development plan isn't borked because the changes come at well-defined points in the set of design-build-test-release cycles that make up the release. But then, I don't think you will ever be happy in any software development shop because change happens. You can manage it in a controlled or in an uncontrolled manner. You can deal with it using a lower or higher cost processes. But making the cost of change artificially high and waving around a stack of paper yelling that "We can't change it because it's not in scope!" leads to failed projects just as surely as trying to absorb any change immediately. It does have one (dubiously) positive effect, though, it does let developers and their managers have a happy CYA moment together before they make the changes anyway.
At least with a traditional methodology, everything is reviewed for feasibility and risks before you invest too much time driving down the wrong path. And a change in scope means a forced review of how this affects everything else too.
Ideally, yes. In reality, most of these "heavy document" processes simply gave developers and their managers a CYA feelgood moment. And then they were told to absorb the change in scope anyway - with insufficient change in schedule. It never worked out in practice very well because it increased the cost of change. In the end, the change came anyway and the developers paid the price. But I'm sure that having a CYA document made the whining so much more effective.
Obviously you didn't RTFA. He said people who don't have landlines tend to skew Democratic and polls that rely on landline calls only might be skewed. I hope that you were trying to be funny (even though you didn't seem to, your comment seeming more sarcastic than funny), because if you weren't, you actually come off as an idiot - and being a sarcastic idiot makes you more of an idiot, not less.
He's fulfilled his promise to withdraw from Iraq in a rapid by responsible way.
Last time I checked, we still had about 50,000 troops in Iraq. Yes they are there as "advisors" and not performing "combat operations" (even though they are), but this is hardly a "withdrawal". At most it is a drawdown, at worst it is just a calm before a new storm when the Sunis and Kurds get tired of being kicked around by their new Shiite dictatorship and start kicking back again when the brib... uh... support for the "Sunni Awakening" dies down. Should happen in a couple more months, unless we actually let the Shiite government step up its campaign against Sunn... uh, terrorists.
Yeah... really nice "withdrawal". A lot of honor when we yet again (as in Vietnam and Yugoslavia) stand by and watch the government torture and kill its own citizens. Even better... supporting it by training our puppet government to do it more effectively. Yes, it still would have happened if we pulled out entirely, but at least we would have cut our moral losses by not supporting it. Very nice work, pseudo-liberal, supporting your side even when it's wrong.
P.S. On the other items, Obama is the worst negotiator in the world, caving at even the rumor of any pushback. He is a disappointment on so many levels. I'm hoping that there's an actual progressive who'll take up the challenge of running against him for the nomination in 2012. Actually, at this point, I'd support anyone else not to the right of Obama who actually had a spine.
I'm lucky in that I live in a state which is firmly in one party's camp (the one I happen to tend towards) represented by a Senator and Congressperson at both the state and local level who are guaranteed to win their seats. As such, I am almost always free to vote for a third party candidate more to the extreme than my major party candidates without fearing that my vote will impact the outcome of the race. The only races that tend to be competitive in my district/state are at the Gubernatorial and state partisan levels and the Presidency - and often, these offices don't have a third party candidate that I can vote for. As such, my voting is relatively worry-free. I'm actually able to vote for candidates I believe in, support minor party candidates, and see the side I'd most like to see win succeed. As I said, I'm a very lucky man.
Now if we could only get a statewide initiative for IRV...
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Microsoft really does have one of the very few pure research groups left in computer science.
I am not an MS fanboi by any means, but I have to agree here. It is becoming very hard to find CS research groups doing really innovative research anymore, even in academia. DoD and NSF funding for pure CS and computational systems has, for the most part, dried up, having been diverted towards biological and weapon-oriented endeavors. The only real funding in CS is in data-mining, "autonomous vehicles", and other areas where the likely outcome is increased kill-rates - with a few bones tossed to large-scale simulation. And certainly no funding in OS and programming language technology large enough to do more than (very) small-scale experiments.
And this is sad, because the state of software has not actually improved since around 1980. We're still stepping through for-loops with debuggers rather than building workable functional and proof-based systems; symbolic AI has been killed off, leaving stochastic models with no ability to explain their conclusions; GUI's, multi-touch excepted, have not changed since then. All else is simply repackaging of old technology.
And it's a shame. Back in the seventies, there were dozens of industrial R&D labs that studied software - even medium-sized companies employing as few as a thousand people often had labs. Now we're down to about a half dozen in the US (most of who are R&D in name only - so heavily weighted towards the "D" that they are). And our research seed-corn is drying up. Fancy that... Thanks MBA's and quarterly outcome investors. You've all really helped here, together with Congress-people who, if something doesn't kill someone, don't think it merits funding. Don't worry, though. I'm sure you'll all still be OK in twenty years when we've lost all of our "innovation" because of lack of basic research to build on. It's just the rest of us little people who'll have to pay through the nose for technology that's developed in places where governments and companies still understand that funding research is worthwhile. Or maybe we'll just get lucky and hit a long global decline in new technology - I've always liked to think that that's how we'll get to the next Dark Ages.
So blessings be on Microsoft and all of the companies that still fund research. They are the few pinpricks of light glowing in an increasingly darkening sky.
I have no problem with his synths - they sound great. I've used them in a lot of my music. I just wish he'd get back to doing what he's good at - making interesting and useful things. Note that I don't believe that crackpottery about the future is a particularly useful thing.
Is that really why so many hate him?
No, we dislike his nuttery because it moves attention from the achievable to the non-achievable. In addition, he makes it sound to many powerful people who have control of funding projects that what he espouses is inevitable, giving them cover to defund projects that may actually benefit mankind because, if the singularity is around the corner, why should they fund anything... In short, Ray is a crackpot who does more harm than good, sort of like a fundamentalist preacher whose minions may do good in a small way (e.g., not killing people - something that they were unlikely to do anyway) but do evil in larger ways every day.
If Ray really wants to help, he should quit the crap and get back to what he was good at - inventing useful things.
I was a singlularity denier, for one thing. But I have to reverse myself and admit that I'm wrong... Try living without today's technology and internet and see how far you get.
Many folks live "off the grid" and have no problem doing so. You had better hope that mankind is not as inflexible as you say, because computer technology is relatively brittle and a catastrophe that brings down the internet (and, according to you, civilization and Ray's vaunted singularity with it) is not that implausible.
Ray takes a lot of flak but he deserves respect, even when you think he's wrong.
Horse. Shit.
Ray is a hack that spouts inexact and mainly non-confirmable crap who deserves about as much respect as Nostradamus. Maybe he can get a show on The "History" Channel, together with the ghosts and aliens who seem to live there with Nostradamus...
The Pentagon and other agencies are looking at ways to tighten security, promising increased internal auditing and banning the ability of systems containing classified information to connect to thumb drives or other removable media.
The more you tighten your grip, Gates and Clinton, the more memos will slip through your fingers...
One of the examples that's now used when teaching this stuff is a brief engagement from the last Golf War...
Was that the one that Arnold Palmer or Tiger Woods won?
USB and Firewire both hook to real audio interface units well enough, although, if you want to go high end, you might still want to use a PCI interface card.
Ever crossed your mind that the number of people who have certain level of talent and skill level are limited?
Yes, but the fact that average salaries have not budged in the past twenty years (not to mention not zooming up to the $1M level you gave your outlandish straw man) shows that we are nowhere near that limit at the present time. Plus, before that point occurs, companies would also start training internally - something else not seen. Why do you cry so loudly to defend the broken status quo?
...at that point a civil suit against the TSA for sexual molestation of a child would be appropriate.
And would be dismissed due to "National Security" concerns.
Is anyone else tired of these "copy the press release" stories? I saw this in the paper, I heard it on NPR. Really? This is news? Anyone who wants the tunes of the Beatles on their iPod has, by now, either ripped them from CD or downloaded the MP3s illegally or is too stupid to survive. Do we really need this joint marketing missive from Apple (Corps and Computer) trumpeted to the world when it's just drumming up business for two mega-corps and (the heirs of) some very wealthy musicians?
And, in the end, who really gives a crap? I've been listening to music for the past forty-plus years. I remember when my older sister bought "Meet the Beatles" and played it ceaselessly for weeks. I liked it. It was good music. They continued to make good music through the early seventies. But that was then. Believe it or not, there have been a lot of people making music since then that is just as good (if not better). By burying yourself in the past, you hold back the future. Move on, people.
Actually, not so much. If you were convicted of murder back in that day, you were hung - and they didn't wait about long for appeals. The crimes of most of the people sent to Australia were quite mundane and driven by poverty with petty theft being one of the main crimes of the people sentenced to this fate.
... the SEC simply doesn't have the resources to stop it.
Well, we can't have that ol' debbil "Big Gov'ment" steppin' all over the mystical, all-knowing, self-correcting, super-duper Free Market, now can we?
MS Kin is like a 60 year old fat dominatrix. Not much going on there, and just trying to play the game because she heard the young'uns were having fun with it.
Oh! A perfect match for Balmer!
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!
That contradicts the idea that God does not deceive, which most Christians believe.
I'd say that Job would probably disagree with you. In the Old Testament, God often deceives in the short term to "test faith" (See also Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac), something which, if for which you want to give Him/Her/It a pass because it wasn't a long-term thing, seems to make Him/Her/It a dick (not to mention really, really insecure about everyone believing in/loving Him/Her/It, too). If I had to believe in a god, I'd rather have it be one that wasn't a dick.
If you believe someone can become a suicide terrorist without religion, then you really don't understand people... or religion.
I'm not religious myself, but I can see some scenarios where I might be willing to sacrifice myself for totally non-religious reasons. Here's one... My city is attacked by a hoard of ravenous zombies. By drawing them out into an uninhabited region with a plate full of brains and detonating a nuclear device, killing myself in the process, I can save my people from the zombie hoard, be remembered as the savior of humanity for the next thousand-plus years, and die knowing that I've done A Good Thing (TM). No religion is involved here and most people would do it to "save the world".
The general point is that, in some cases, people will give their lives to save others, religion notwithstanding. Now, this usually happens for political reasons - people are often willing to sacrifice to throw off a (perceived) oppressor. In reality, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and beyond have very little to do with religion - they are simply the continuation of politics by other means (my apologies to von Clausewitz) - and they would occur even if there was no religion because the people who foment these actions simply see this as war. The religion thing just makes it easier to recruit volunteers. But don't assume you couldn't do the same thing by appealing to someone's sense of justice or patriotism instead.
... mainly because they are both nuclear powers, so we are going to do everything we can to make nice with both of them at every opportunity.
Why? It's not like they'd be lobbing their nukes at us. And once they were done lobbing their nukes at each other, it's not like they'd be in much of a position to lob any more.
I'm glad I had my porn backed up on my hard drive. No downtime for me...
A very astute set of observations, showing that the poster of the above actually understands this aspect of agile development. However, you are incorrect about one thing: That's why managers hate "people over process" and why Agile IT gets loaded down with more process: resources are so much easier to manage than people.
As a manager, I disagree - this mindset might be true among some managers, but not all of us. I find people a lot easier to manage if you treat them as people and not as resources. In fact, assuming you've done your hiring and training correctly, most teams end up being "self managing" after a while with the only thing you need to deal with are occasional corrections and helping to set priorities (and, of course, managing your team's face to the rest of the organization, getting physical resources, etc.). That's a lot easier than having to go over a bunch of paper each day making sure that every "i" is dotted and every "t" is crossed for some arbitrary process. However, it does make it more critical to hire the right people - look for flexibility and intelligence rather than for a code monkey and you'll be on the right track. And, I'll almost always take a generalist over a specialist. That being said, I wouldn't pass on process in some places - but, thankfully, most of us are not working in avionics, health care devices, or nuclear power station control systems (to name a few).
From that experience what Agile means for me is TOTAL lack of Q&A.
Given your own lack of QA (Quality Assurance) in your post, I would see where this would be a tragedy, as you obviously need an external source monitoring your work.
For your information:
QA = Quality Assurance (sometimes, Quality Assessment) - a process by which quality of a product is assessed (so it can be remediated) or assured before a product is shipped.
Q&A = Question and Answer - a period during or after a talk and/or interview where questions can be asked and, hopefully, answered.
I hope this helps end your debasement of the English language.
The marketing idiot walks in and wants feature X added like yesterday since he will be doing a demo day after tomorrow and it simply has to be there because he saw it on a competitors product. Programming Manager fearing for his job desperately Googles like a madman looking for feature X and finds it in a 100,000 line framework and tells the troops to "Put it in" since even if they dropped EVERYTHING and ALL the programmers immediately started trying to implements feature X it would take a month to do it right. In doing so, they implement feature X and introduce 30 more critical bugs which now have to be tracked down in code that no one in the shop is familiar with and have bloated their code base by 50% because they are "Agile".
And this is not "agile" - this is uncontrolled chaos. But go ahead - tell me how a strict requirements document would protect you from this. Either the marketing idiot has enough power over your development manager to make him dance like a monkey or he doesn't. A magic set of requirements or design documents won't change this. But then programmers usually are a superstitious lot, anyway, assuming that their paper talismans will protect them. And anyway, it gives them more justification for their ineffective whining.
And, in case you were wondering (which you aren't because you've already made up your mind about lightweight processes), the proper response of the development manager would be to tell the marketing idiot that this would go into the next sprint/iteration/whatever. It's a win-win where the marketing idiot doesn't have to wait for an entire release for his latest brain fart and your development plan isn't borked because the changes come at well-defined points in the set of design-build-test-release cycles that make up the release. But then, I don't think you will ever be happy in any software development shop because change happens. You can manage it in a controlled or in an uncontrolled manner. You can deal with it using a lower or higher cost processes. But making the cost of change artificially high and waving around a stack of paper yelling that "We can't change it because it's not in scope!" leads to failed projects just as surely as trying to absorb any change immediately. It does have one (dubiously) positive effect, though, it does let developers and their managers have a happy CYA moment together before they make the changes anyway.
At least with a traditional methodology, everything is reviewed for feasibility and risks before you invest too much time driving down the wrong path. And a change in scope means a forced review of how this affects everything else too.
Ideally, yes. In reality, most of these "heavy document" processes simply gave developers and their managers a CYA feelgood moment. And then they were told to absorb the change in scope anyway - with insufficient change in schedule. It never worked out in practice very well because it increased the cost of change. In the end, the change came anyway and the developers paid the price. But I'm sure that having a CYA document made the whining so much more effective.
Obviously you didn't RTFA. He said people who don't have landlines tend to skew Democratic and polls that rely on landline calls only might be skewed. I hope that you were trying to be funny (even though you didn't seem to, your comment seeming more sarcastic than funny), because if you weren't, you actually come off as an idiot - and being a sarcastic idiot makes you more of an idiot, not less.
He's fulfilled his promise to withdraw from Iraq in a rapid by responsible way.
Last time I checked, we still had about 50,000 troops in Iraq. Yes they are there as "advisors" and not performing "combat operations" (even though they are), but this is hardly a "withdrawal". At most it is a drawdown, at worst it is just a calm before a new storm when the Sunis and Kurds get tired of being kicked around by their new Shiite dictatorship and start kicking back again when the brib... uh... support for the "Sunni Awakening" dies down. Should happen in a couple more months, unless we actually let the Shiite government step up its campaign against Sunn... uh, terrorists.
Yeah... really nice "withdrawal". A lot of honor when we yet again (as in Vietnam and Yugoslavia) stand by and watch the government torture and kill its own citizens. Even better... supporting it by training our puppet government to do it more effectively. Yes, it still would have happened if we pulled out entirely, but at least we would have cut our moral losses by not supporting it. Very nice work, pseudo-liberal, supporting your side even when it's wrong.
P.S. On the other items, Obama is the worst negotiator in the world, caving at even the rumor of any pushback. He is a disappointment on so many levels. I'm hoping that there's an actual progressive who'll take up the challenge of running against him for the nomination in 2012. Actually, at this point, I'd support anyone else not to the right of Obama who actually had a spine.
I'm lucky in that I live in a state which is firmly in one party's camp (the one I happen to tend towards) represented by a Senator and Congressperson at both the state and local level who are guaranteed to win their seats. As such, I am almost always free to vote for a third party candidate more to the extreme than my major party candidates without fearing that my vote will impact the outcome of the race. The only races that tend to be competitive in my district/state are at the Gubernatorial and state partisan levels and the Presidency - and often, these offices don't have a third party candidate that I can vote for. As such, my voting is relatively worry-free. I'm actually able to vote for candidates I believe in, support minor party candidates, and see the side I'd most like to see win succeed. As I said, I'm a very lucky man.
Now if we could only get a statewide initiative for IRV...