Re:Flaws in both Languages
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
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Bit ironic coming from someone posting to a web site that's written in perl.
Slashdot, livejournal, wikipedia, sourceforge, yahoo... we're talking about sites that get 100+ hits a second, and... oh no... written in PHP or perl??
(Not that I'm bashing.NET or Java. They can really kick ass if you know how to use them. In my fantasy world, someone has designed PHP.NET, php for ASP.NET using mono. Also, I am a captain of industry, the Iraq war wasn't planned by these monkeys and have the power to grant wishes.)
Yes, but aside from the fact that the Constitution Party *does* advocate not changing the Consitution, their entire remaining platform appears to me to be stupid, short-sighted, and offensive. They dislike foreigners, free trade, and homosexuals (I must admit, when a party's platform says that a party is "anti-homosexual", images of the KKK and Nazi party start floating by). They have ties to anti-female equality ideas.
You've obviously never read the Texas GOP party platform. Most of the current GOP leadership (Rove, Bush, DeLay) are members and have presumably signed this document in order to meet its bylaws.
Here are some excerpts (I've bolded a bit):
Our Party pledges to do everything within its power to restore the original intent of the First Amendment of the United States and the concept of the separation of Church and State and dispel the myth of the separation of Church and State.
The party opposes the decriminalization of sodomy
No homosexual or any individual convicted of child abuse or molestation should have the right to custody or adoption of a minor child, and that visitation with minor children by such persons should be limited to supervised periods.
The Party believes that scientific topics, such as the question of universe and life origins and environmental theories, should not be constrained to one opinion or viewpoint. We support the teaching equally of scientific strengths and weaknesses of all scientific theories--as Texas now requires (but has yet to enforce) in public school science course standards. We urge revising all environmental education standards to require this also. We support individual teachers' right to teach creation science in Texas public schools.
The Party believes the minimum wage law should be repealed.
The Party urges Congress to support HJR 77, the Panama and America Security Act, which declare the Carter-Torrijos Treaty null and void. We support re-establishing United States control over the Canal in order to retain our military bases in Panama, to preserve our right to transit through the Canal, and to prevent the establishment of Chinese missile bases in Panama.
The Party recognizes that peace and order are prerequisites for an environment conducive to education for both the student and the teacher. We therefore recommend that local school boards and classroom teachers be given more authority to deal with disciplinary problems. Corporal punishment should be used when appropriate and we encourage the legislature to strengthen existing immunity laws, respecting corporal punishment. We urge the Texas Legislature, Governor, Commissioner of Education and State Board of Education to remind administrators and school boards that corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas.
Any person filing as a Republican candidate for a public or Party office shall be provided a current copy of the Party platform at the time of filing. The candidate shall be asked to read and initial each page of the platform and sign a statement affirming he/she has read the entire platform.
Believe me, there's no shortage of chestnuts like this if you click on the link, and read it yourself. Read that last bit again and remember that the House GOP and the White House are run by signatories of this document.
They may be a private entity, but they're using public property, namely airwaves and university grounds. So, the assertion that they should be free to regulate who takes part in the debates as they please is fallacious. Public resources equals public responsibility.
And if you define "public responsibility" as "what I personally want" I can see how this would work out for you. It's an awfully strange way to define the best public interest as what ~4% of the population wants. That's not how democracy works.
Also, in the wider picture, though technically the legality might be on the side of the CPD, what is the moral thing here? Is it right that third party candidates can not debate the major candidates in ANY venue?
If there were sufficient public demand to make it look bad for them if they didn't, then they would debate them.
If either of the two major party candidates thought they would be better off by not debating even each other, then you can bet they wouldn't do it. W tried this in 2000: he wanted only 1 debate on broadcast TV, and the other 2 on cable shows that he knew would have a much smaller audience. It started to make him look bad, so he changed his mind and did it the old fashioned way.
I know what you're going to say: It's a catch-22! How are you supposed to be popular without being allowed into the debate? Well, the premise here is that you can't be popular unless you appear in 3 90 minute debates, which seems a bit shaky to me. Only a very small portion of the voting public changes their minds because of the debates; and Ross Perot was able to get enough popularity to get in without him or his party ever having debated before. So I don't buy it.
I just wish we could talk about these things without blaming the people involved for doing what everyone has done in the same situation. The candidates may, in fact, be corrupt plutocrat fatheads, but that's not why they choose not debate the green and Libertarian parties. It's because they don't think it's in their best interest. And even if they are insane, spineless witchdoctors they would do it if they thought it was in their best interest. If they were faced with the choice of risking losing more votes by not debating than they stood to gain or lose by debating, they would take that choice every time.
What's bemusing to a European eye is that it seems to be the places which are most likely to be devastated by global warming that are most likely to vote for Bush.
What's also interesting is that those least likely to be the victim of a terrorist attack are most likely to vote for Bush. That is, the best predictor of being a victim of a terrorist attack is population density, and this is also the best predictor of voting for Kerry. At the moment, Kerry is leading in Washington, DC at 78-11. That's an impressive 67 point lead. (Nader, at 9%, is only 2 points behind Bush.) Similar numbers for NYC.
I don't know, I had just been thinking about this when I came across the above post. Some explanations are simple but I think there's gotta be another variable behind this somewhere.
Unfortanetly, the two major parties have stacked things to make it difficult for a viable third party to establish itself.
This is a democracy. You can't blame the politicians for what the voters are willing to accept.
Prominent members of both parties (e.g. John McCain, Howard Dean) support Instant Runoff Voting. If a coherent conglomeration of voters large enough to swing a close election made themselves apparent, we'd have it in short order.
It does not compare the Daily Show to CNN or O'Reilly specifically, but found that the audience of the former was more knowledgeable than the average person who watched "network news", "cable news" or "newspapers."
This finding was held controlling for all other variables, specifically: education level, party identification, 'following politics', watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender.
Because all sources of news are "more or less biased" does that mean that all sources of news are equally biased?
Everything, everything you even see with your own eyes biased one way or the other. So, does that mean that we just should throw out everything?
No, it does not. Some sources of information are more reliable that others. A Nobel Prize winner and a political mouthpiece at Tech Central Station are both "biased" in some way or other to some degree or other. Now, would you trust them both equally on a subject, like, say, climate change? I certainly hope you would not.
The White House has never denied that GWB was banned from flying for failing to take a physical. The Rather documents purpotedly proved that he disobeyed a direct order to do so (a felony), but "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit" when his biography said he was in Texas hasn't been in the news because it isn't news.
The way to get a third party elected in this country is not to get them on the ballots, it's to change to a runoff voting system.
As long as we have a winner-takes-all voting system, there will always be two dominant political parties at any given time.
History has shown that in any of the very rare occurences that a third party gained enough power to come close to winning an election in this country, it very quickly either died out or replaced and became one of the two dominant political parties at the time.
Let me say it again: The way to get a third party elected in this country is not to get them on the ballots, it's to change to a runoff voting system.
Seriously, the blunders in this war that are nice and abstract to the warbloggers willing to stomach them are much more real to someone who experiences them firsthand. Bush's support is highest in rural areas -- those farthest removed from any actual danger of a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, cities like DC and NYC are democratic strongholds.
I use it for writing and organizing my own ideas on anything. It's such a better way or collecting and -- interlinking -- your thoughts.
That said, I wish I could use the same process with an Office suite -- ie, I really find myself wishing I had a "real" text editor rather than lamely plugging away into an html form. Doing something like a spreadsheet is possible, it's just dreadfully tedious. I wish someone would take OpenOffice and make it into OfficeWiki. You should really be able to use this to work with any kind of data other than straight ascii-html text.
30,000 is a sizable chunk of the 350,000 articles in the English language that you and I use. The 1,000,000 refers to articles in every of the several dozen languages Wikipedia is offered in.
Eh, I was wrong and misinformed. Though I was not aware that they had apologized for doing so, it still meets the criteria specified by the original poster -- perhaps analogous to this current CBS business.
Radical leftists, "activists" and other revolutionary types love to make stink about FOX News, but you don't see them being caught trying to influence the outcome of the election by passing off counterfeit documents, do you?
Here's another interesting study that found that misperceptions of the war are strongly related to the source of news people primarily watch.
Take these three ideas:
* evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda has been found * weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq * world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq
Overall, 60% of the US public believed in one of the three of the above statements at the time of the study (all of which are false).
Here's the breakdown by the viewers' news source:
Fox News: 80% CBS News: 71% ABC News: 61% NBC News: 55% CNN: 55% Print sources: 47% NPR/PBS: 23%
Finally, proof that Fox News rots your brain. Also note that the swarthy liberals watching CBS were the second-most likely to have these war-justifying and completely false perceptions.
"the leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, Masoud, lay dead, his murder ordered by Saddam Hussein, by Osama bin Laden, Taliban's co-conspirator."
"Saddam Hussein, if he's alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught. And we've not seen him on a video since 2001."
Let me say that again -- he said this *last week* -- 9/10/2004.
Here's the original CSPAN realvideo clip. The whole thing is a prime example of 9/11-Iraq-9/11-Iraq conflation by repetition and insinuation. Iraq was celebrating shooting an unmanned American drone, and at the same time, Hanni Hanjour was checking into a Marriott in New Jersey...
This stuff goes on all the time, and no one seems to notice. Instead all they do is chant shit like "Al Gore said he invented the internet!" but I can't even imagine what kinds of spasms they'd go into if he was in charge and said shit like this on a daily basis. Paul Wolfowitz said a couple of months ago that there were 350 combat deaths in Iraq, at a time when there were more than 700. '"He misspoke," spokesman Charley Cooper said later. "That's all."'
And Orwell wrote this in 1949:
O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature."
While it is true that no voting system is perfect, that certainly does not mean that all voting systems are equally imperfect. It's hard to see what advantages our current system has over a runoff system.
So we just have to make election officials all computer engineers. Simple.
Needless to say (I thought) the costs of doing this would totally outweigh a tradional voting system. Every attempt trying to make computer voting more reasonable only ever shows how innately infeasible the whole idea is. The benefits (what benefits?) do not outweigh the costs.
John McCain, Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean support instant-runoff voting (a kind of preferential voting). Of course, they're principled so they're always going to lose to the shill-driven jokers we're so used to in this country (not to say that some shill-driven jokers aren't strikingly worse than others).
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Bit ironic coming from someone posting to a web site that's written in perl.
.NET or Java. They can really kick ass if you know how to use them. In my fantasy world, someone has designed PHP.NET, php for ASP.NET using mono. Also, I am a captain of industry, the Iraq war wasn't planned by these monkeys and have the power to grant wishes.)
Slashdot, livejournal, wikipedia, sourceforge, yahoo... we're talking about sites that get 100+ hits a second, and... oh no... written in PHP or perl??
(Not that I'm bashing
You've obviously never read the Texas GOP party platform. Most of the current GOP leadership (Rove, Bush, DeLay) are members and have presumably signed this document in order to meet its bylaws.
Here are some excerpts (I've bolded a bit):
Believe me, there's no shortage of chestnuts like this if you click on the link, and read it yourself. Read that last bit again and remember that the House GOP and the White House are run by signatories of this document.
They may be a private entity, but they're using public property, namely airwaves and university grounds. So, the assertion that they should be free to regulate who takes part in the debates as they please is fallacious. Public resources equals public responsibility.
And if you define "public responsibility" as "what I personally want" I can see how this would work out for you. It's an awfully strange way to define the best public interest as what ~4% of the population wants. That's not how democracy works.
Also, in the wider picture, though technically the legality might be on the side of the CPD, what is the moral thing here? Is it right that third party candidates can not debate the major candidates in ANY venue?
If there were sufficient public demand to make it look bad for them if they didn't, then they would debate them.
If either of the two major party candidates thought they would be better off by not debating even each other, then you can bet they wouldn't do it. W tried this in 2000: he wanted only 1 debate on broadcast TV, and the other 2 on cable shows that he knew would have a much smaller audience. It started to make him look bad, so he changed his mind and did it the old fashioned way.
I know what you're going to say: It's a catch-22! How are you supposed to be popular without being allowed into the debate? Well, the premise here is that you can't be popular unless you appear in 3 90 minute debates, which seems a bit shaky to me. Only a very small portion of the voting public changes their minds because of the debates; and Ross Perot was able to get enough popularity to get in without him or his party ever having debated before. So I don't buy it.
I just wish we could talk about these things without blaming the people involved for doing what everyone has done in the same situation. The candidates may, in fact, be corrupt plutocrat fatheads, but that's not why they choose not debate the green and Libertarian parties. It's because they don't think it's in their best interest. And even if they are insane, spineless witchdoctors they would do it if they thought it was in their best interest. If they were faced with the choice of risking losing more votes by not debating than they stood to gain or lose by debating, they would take that choice every time.
Who says that non-gamers that vote know anything about real, deep political issues?
What's bemusing to a European eye is that it seems to be the places which are most likely to be devastated by global warming that are most likely to vote for Bush.
What's also interesting is that those least likely to be the victim of a terrorist attack are most likely to vote for Bush. That is, the best predictor of being a victim of a terrorist attack is population density, and this is also the best predictor of voting for Kerry. At the moment, Kerry is leading in Washington, DC at 78-11. That's an impressive 67 point lead. (Nader, at 9%, is only 2 points behind Bush.) Similar numbers for NYC.
It's been pointed out before that states receiving comparatively less and paying more for federal benefits are more likely to be in favor of them.
I don't know, I had just been thinking about this when I came across the above post. Some explanations are simple but I think there's gotta be another variable behind this somewhere.
Unfortanetly, the two major parties have stacked things to make it difficult for a viable third party to establish itself.
This is a democracy. You can't blame the politicians for what the voters are willing to accept.
Prominent members of both parties (e.g. John McCain, Howard Dean) support Instant Runoff Voting. If a coherent conglomeration of voters large enough to swing a close election made themselves apparent, we'd have it in short order.
Advantage: people who read.
No, according to the study Daily Show viewers outscored newspaper readers. (Not joking)
The original research report is here (warning: PDF file)
It does not compare the Daily Show to CNN or O'Reilly specifically, but found that the audience of the former was more knowledgeable than the average person who watched "network news", "cable news" or "newspapers."
This finding was held controlling for all other variables, specifically: education level, party identification, 'following politics', watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender.
Because all sources of news are "more or less biased" does that mean that all sources of news are equally biased?
Everything, everything you even see with your own eyes biased one way or the other. So, does that mean that we just should throw out everything?
No, it does not. Some sources of information are more reliable that others. A Nobel Prize winner and a political mouthpiece at Tech Central Station are both "biased" in some way or other to some degree or other. Now, would you trust them both equally on a subject, like, say, climate change? I certainly hope you would not.
The only objective evidence that he did not have a lousy record was soundly trounced as being a forgery. There is no other evidence, only accusation.
Oh, really?
The White House has never denied that GWB was banned from flying for failing to take a physical. The Rather documents purpotedly proved that he disobeyed a direct order to do so (a felony), but "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit" when his biography said he was in Texas hasn't been in the news because it isn't news.
The way to get a third party elected in this country is not to get them on the ballots, it's to change to a runoff voting system.
As long as we have a winner-takes-all voting system, there will always be two dominant political parties at any given time.
History has shown that in any of the very rare occurences that a third party gained enough power to come close to winning an election in this country, it very quickly either died out or replaced and became one of the two dominant political parties at the time.
Let me say it again: The way to get a third party elected in this country is not to get them on the ballots, it's to change to a runoff voting system.
When you have a four year presidential record and a 19 year senate record to consider
You have no idea how politics in the US works.
I'm not sure how pro-Bush I'd be if I was told that I could re-enlist now or be sent directly to Iraq for the remainder of your time in service just to punch the falling re-enlistment numbers up.
Seriously, the blunders in this war that are nice and abstract to the warbloggers willing to stomach them are much more real to someone who experiences them firsthand. Bush's support is highest in rural areas -- those farthest removed from any actual danger of a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, cities like DC and NYC are democratic strongholds.
I use it for writing and organizing my own ideas on anything. It's such a better way or collecting and -- interlinking -- your thoughts.
That said, I wish I could use the same process with an Office suite -- ie, I really find myself wishing I had a "real" text editor rather than lamely plugging away into an html form. Doing something like a spreadsheet is possible, it's just dreadfully tedious. I wish someone would take OpenOffice and make it into OfficeWiki. You should really be able to use this to work with any kind of data other than straight ascii-html text.
30,000 is a sizable chunk of the 350,000 articles in the English language that you and I use. The 1,000,000 refers to articles in every of the several dozen languages Wikipedia is offered in.
Eh, I was wrong and misinformed. Though I was not aware that they had apologized for doing so, it still meets the criteria specified by the original poster -- perhaps analogous to this current CBS business.
Don't forget, the meta-moderation system won't kick in for a little bit.
Radical leftists, "activists" and other revolutionary types love to make stink about FOX News, but you don't see them being caught trying to influence the outcome of the election by passing off counterfeit documents, do you?
Oh, don't you?
That photo was shown repeatedly on Fox News' Brit Hume, Hannity & Colmes, and John Gibson's shows. And no, they never retracted or apologized for it.
Here's another interesting study that found that misperceptions of the war are strongly related to the source of news people primarily watch.
Take these three ideas:
* evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda has been found
* weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq
* world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq
Overall, 60% of the US public believed in one of the three of the above statements at the time of the study (all of which are false).
Here's the breakdown by the viewers' news source:
Fox News: 80%
CBS News: 71%
ABC News: 61%
NBC News: 55%
CNN: 55%
Print sources: 47%
NPR/PBS: 23%
Finally, proof that Fox News rots your brain. Also note that the swarthy liberals watching CBS were the second-most likely to have these war-justifying and completely false perceptions.
No doubt you want the same treatment for Hannity & Fox News for extensively showing forged photos of John Kerry?
We have irrefutable proof those are not your photos:
There are girls in the pictures.
So, he knows how to use a telephoto lens.
Don't worry, the American people are only as out of touch with reality as the leaders!
Donald Rumsfeld said these things in a speech a week ago:
"the leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, Masoud, lay dead, his murder ordered by Saddam Hussein, by Osama bin Laden, Taliban's co-conspirator."
"Saddam Hussein, if he's alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught. And we've not seen him on a video since 2001."
Let me say that again -- he said this *last week* -- 9/10/2004.
Here's the original CSPAN realvideo clip. The whole thing is a prime example of 9/11-Iraq-9/11-Iraq conflation by repetition and insinuation. Iraq was celebrating shooting an unmanned American drone, and at the same time, Hanni Hanjour was checking into a Marriott in New Jersey...
This stuff goes on all the time, and no one seems to notice. Instead all they do is chant shit like "Al Gore said he invented the internet!" but I can't even imagine what kinds of spasms they'd go into if he was in charge and said shit like this on a daily basis. Paul Wolfowitz said a couple of months ago that there were 350 combat deaths in Iraq, at a time when there were more than 700. '"He misspoke," spokesman Charley Cooper said later. "That's all."'
And Orwell wrote this in 1949:
O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature."
The theorem you are thinking of is Arrow's theorem.
While it is true that no voting system is perfect, that certainly does not mean that all voting systems are equally imperfect. It's hard to see what advantages our current system has over a runoff system.
So we just have to make election officials all computer engineers. Simple.
Needless to say (I thought) the costs of doing this would totally outweigh a tradional voting system. Every attempt trying to make computer voting more reasonable only ever shows how innately infeasible the whole idea is. The benefits (what benefits?) do not outweigh the costs.
The link in the above post should be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
John McCain, Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean support instant-runoff voting (a kind of preferential voting). Of course, they're principled so they're always going to lose to the shill-driven jokers we're so used to in this country (not to say that some shill-driven jokers aren't strikingly worse than others).