Friday, February 03, 2006

Send in the clowns


The American Spectator's John Tabin on the State of the Union speech:

...the Democrats clapped and hooted as soon as Bush said "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security," giving Bush an opening to turn his bromide into a scathing attack: When he said "partisan politics," he had a visual aid to point to.

Suddenly it was as if Bush said "we mustn't act like clowns," and the entire Democratic caucus had shown up in multicolor wigs and greasepaint.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Today's headlines from the Associated Press


Ho hum. Reading the newspaper this morning. Here's a front-page story from the Associated Press:

GAO report on Katrina lays most on Bush

The White House and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff failed to provide decisive action when Hurricane Katrina struck, congressional investigators said Wednesday...


What? You say that headline's highly misleading? Really? You say the Department of Homeland Security has complete responsibility for FEMA? And that a national plan was in place last year for coordinating federal, state, and local disaster response? Oh.

*** Dum de dum *** (flipping pages) Hey, another headline. 40-point font, too. From the Associated Press.

Bush defends Big Oil's gigantic profits

President Bush defended the huge profits of Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) Wednesday, saying they are simply the result of the marketplace...


What's that? You say that headline's misleading, too? You say global demand for oil is way up because of China, India and other countries? And that the simple law of supply-and-demand dictates higher prices?

But what about having more refineries and more exploration and drilling, so we can reduce our demand for Middle Eastern oil?

Seriously? You say Maria Cantwell (D-WA) has demanded investigations into why we're not building more refineries? But she also is restricting refineries in her home state? Oh.

'Scuse me? And Byron Dorgan (D-ND) wants to give tax breaks to companies that invest in new energy production? But he opposes opening up ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf to exploration? Oh.

Huh? You say it's a good thing that American investors are profiting from XOM and its competitors? You say lots of mutual funds hold XOM? And my mutual funds may have gone up this year -- along with millions of other investors -- because of their profits? Oh. Okay. Maybe I should buy more energy mutual funds and profit along with the rest of the shareholders. I guess that's what free markets mean.

** Doo deet doo *** (flipping pages). 'Nother headline. Author: Andrew Taylor of the Associated Press.

House votes to trim Medicaid costs

The House on Wednesday narrowly approved Congress' first attempt in eight years to slow the growth of Medicaid and student loan subsidies...


What's that? You say the cuts represent 0.4 percent over five years? And that our entitlement spending (social security, Medicare, Medicaid...) is projected to consume 62% of the federal budget within a decade if left unchecked?

Oh.

And you say that the House Democrats voted -- in nearly a straight party line -- against even these miniscule spending measures?

Gotcha.

*** Ntt nuh ntt ntt ntt *** (flipping pages). Interesting. The Western Union's last telegraph just closed up shop.

For some reason that reminds me of the Associated Press.

Can't quite put my finger on it, though.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

A consistent record of excellence in city government


Liberal utopia: San Francisco. Where the streets are paved with gold and violent crime never perturbs the enlightened citizenry. After all, that's the mark of Democratic city leadership, right? Because when strict gun-control laws are passed, criminals will instantly obey and turn in all of their firearms at the nearest police station. And then (--- humming ---) peace and love will guide the planet... and cri-ime will disappear.

What? You say homicides are on the increase in Frisco? And that police had to respond to 315 shootings last year, 21% more than in '04?

Oops.

Well, let's listen in as Democratic Mayor Thomas "Mumbles" Menino of Boston explains how he's eradicated violent crime in the Beantown area through strict gun-control.

What's that?

You say violent crime is way up since Menino took office?

How about Chicago?

Detroit, maybe?

DC?

Oh.

Never mind.

President Bush battles the Retreat Merchants


Holy shnikeys, these are some good quotes from the State of the Union address:

"There is no peace in retreat and there is no honor in retreat."

"We would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals or even our own courage."

"The United States will not retreat from the world and we will never surrender to evil."

"America rejects the false comfort of isolationism."

"There is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success and defeatism that refuses to see anything but failure. Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy."


You gonna put some ice on that, Senators Biden, Kennedy, Davos Kerry, Pelosi, Reid, and Schumer?

Jon Ham live-blogged the speech. Best line: "9:10: Nancy Pelosi seems to be stalking Bush."

Hamas demands Spain give up Seville


The Hamas children’s web site, Al Fateh, insists that Spain return of the city of Seville. And, no, this doesn't appear to be a joke.

The children’s website Al Fateh, property of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, demands in its most recent issue the return of the Spanish city of Seville to the “lost paradise” of Al Andalus, as the Muslim part of Spain was called during its existence between 711 and 1492. The web magazine, whose name means “conqueror,” says it is for “the young builders of the future.”


I'm sure the Spanish will get right on that.

Associated Press Watch


Here's a lede from the AP in an article covering last night's SOTU speech (hat tip: PoliPundit):

A politically weakened President Bush declared Tuesday night that America must break its long dependence on Mideast oil and rebuked critics of his stay-the-course strategy for the unpopular war in Iraq.


You probably weren't able to detect the nuanced, gentle bias of that lede, were you? That's why you can rely on me, a semi-professional observer of the Associated Press, to read between the lines. Well, maybe not semi-professional, but certainly a diligent amateur.

I wonder how politically weakened President Bush will be after John Paul Stevens retires and his third conservative Supreme Court Justice is confirmed? I'll have to ruminate on that a while. In the mean time, relax and enjoy the muzak.

Inventor develops 'artificial gills'

Remember those old Aquaman comic books? Maybe they weren't so far-fetched after all. An Israeli inventor has developed an underwater breathing system that literally squeezes oxygen directly from seawater, doing away with the need for compressed air tanks...

read more

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Beating the high cost of gas


There are five million automobile engines currently driving around the U.S. that are fully equipped to survive without gasoline. The brands? Ford Taurus and Explorer. Dodge Stratus. Chevy Suburban. And others. These vehicles are capable of running on an energy source that costs less than gasoline, is renewable, and has almost no emissions.

And, no, I'm not kidding.

Ethanol -- somewhat similar to the central ingredient of the "Purple Monkey Punch" (pure grain alcohol) you probably drank at one point or another during college -- can be made from corn and corn husks, sugar cane, wood chips, and other agricultural waste products. This biomass-based fuel is "cellulosic ethanol" and it burns far cleaner than gas: emissions are reduced more than 80% and no acid-rain byproducts are released while burning.

The Department of Energy cautiously posits that ethanol could cut America's gas consumption by 30% within 25 years:

In Decatur, Ill., nobody is waiting around for the future; demand for ethanol from corn is booming right now. This grain-elevator-dotted town is home to agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, which makes it the capital of the old-school heavily subsidized U.S. ethanol industry. On a blustery January day, the air is thick with fog, sleet, and condensation from the corn mills on the 600-acre complex next to ADM's corporate office. Outside the ethanol plant, the air smells like grape juice gone bad. Inside, with its giant vats and fermentation towers, the biorefinery resembles a winery, but it's much noisier.


How to Beat the High Cost of Gasoline. Forever!

Best of PoliPundit


I just broke out in a spate of snickering and, dare I say it, outright laughing, over the latest news blurbs from PoliPundit. Here's a taste, but be sure to read their group blog. Every day.

Here’s a report that will not be featured – assuming it even sees the light of day – over on cBS/NBC/ABC/CNN/MSNBC/NPR: "[National] Guard plans to expand amid recruiting boost"

* * *

Do you enjoy watching Ted Kennedy yelling futilely, as he watches conservatives taking over the Supreme Court? Video here. Enjoy.

* * *

Here’s the official press release about the MediaCrats’ pathetic filibuster attempt from the Moonbats over at Alliance for Justice. Ironically, they’re quite correct about one thing:

Americans will feel the impact of [Justice Alito’s] nomination for years to come.


No doubt. As we’ve mentioned quite often around these parts, Justice Alito is likely to remain on the High Court – beating the lingering vestiges of leftism utterly senseless – for at least 25 years to come.

* * *

John ("Davos") Kerry managed to get a grand total of 24 other MediaCrats to join him in that silly fund raising, er, filibuster ploy. Cute, huh?

In any event, the cloture motion passed, 72-25-3. Justice Alito formally will be confirmed to the SCOTUS tomorrow morning. At only 55 years of age, Justice Alito will be helping to eradicate the vestiges of leftism as national public policy long after they finally get around to removing those wax figures of Pat Leahy, Ted Kennedy…..

Hold on a second.

Huh?

Really?

Hmm.

Those are *not* wax figures?

Oh.

He’ll be on the SCOTUS for a long time, Chomsky.

So, get used to him.

Taliban Reloaded


Inspired by the sweeping success story that was the Taliban, the Hamas government -- newly installed as the Palestinian leadership party (and infamous terror group) -- has decided to revamp the territories' legal system. Using shari’a law, which worked out so well in Afghanistan:

The incoming Hamas government will move quickly to make Islamic sharia “a source” of law in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and will overhaul the Palestinian education system to separate boys and girls and introduce a more Islamic curriculum, a senior official in the movement said yesterday.


LGF: Hamas First Legislative Act: Shari'a Law

Monday, January 30, 2006

Microsoft Tricks Hacker Into Jail

Investigators hired by Microsoft ran a sting operation, which earned a Connecticut man two years in prison for selling Windows source code. The code had circulated widely on the Internet via peer-to-peer sharing networks, but this perp was one of the few to try to sell it.

The big news, in my opinion, is what he figured Windows source code was worth: twenty bucks.

read more | digg story

Using Java Could lead to Death


The fine-print of the Java license agreement (hat tip: Dark Side):

The software product may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines , or weapon systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.


Uhm, okaaaaaaaaay.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Which language for teaching Computer Science?


I may be the last software geek on the planet to have read it, but Joel Spolsky's "The perils of Java in schools" resonated with me. Spolsky's premise is that Java isn't "hard" enough to weed out the competent from the incompetent software talent. For that, Spolsky claims, concepts like pointers and recursion are required. If a student can't digest and master those two facets of Computer Science, he or she shouldn't be a CS major. Spolsky notes:

...[the] real value [of these concepts] is that building big systems requires the kind of mental flexibility you get from learning about them, and the mental aptitude you need to avoid being weeded out of the courses in which they are taught. Pointers and recursion require a certain ability to reason, to think in abstractions, and, most importantly, to view a problem at several levels of abstraction simultaneously. And thus, the ability to understand pointers and recursion is directly correlated with the ability to be a great programmer.

Nothing about an all-Java CS degree really weeds out the students who lack the mental agility to deal with these concepts.


So why does it resonate with me? Is it because I was weaned on Intel 8080 assembler and then graduated to a high-level language: x86 assembler? That was a joke (believe me when I tell you that writing a "Space Invaders" game in x86 assembler for the Sanyo MBC550 -- which I did for fun in the eighties -- is no walk in the park).

Is it because I probably wrote somewhere around a half a million of lines of C code for FASTech and Alpha Software? Or hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ for extremely large organizations in my gigs as an IT consultant ("no JVMs need apply... we want performance, dammit! We need... ISAPI!")?

I'm not really sure. I love Java as an O-O teaching tool. There's no better set of tutorials on the planet for object-oriented programming than Sun's walk-throughs. But Java has always seemed like a toy to me. The layers of abstraction between the bare metal of the machine and me -- the developer -- seemed onerous and unncessary. And it didn't help that Java performance in the early days was, at best, weak.

The old JVMs were also problematic. Just when you least expect it, they'd decide it was time to garbage-collect. And then you'd watch the CPU spike. There was no predictability and no instrumentation on the JVM to help. Even today, if you need to escape to the bare metal, Java requires a strenuous escapement layer called JNI. 99% of the time, sure, you don't need to get to the bare metal. But for that 1% of the time when you need absolute performance or access to a low-level capability...

Bottom line is that Spolsky is right. Java is not challenging enough to teach both the low-level and the high-level concepts of software engineering. But there's also a problem with teaching C or C++: the really good developers aren't teachers... they're working in industry somewhere. I believe it's exceptionally hard to become really skilled at C/C++ unless you work with it for years. My guess is that mastering C requires at least a year of non-stop, real world development. C++ (with appropriate libraries such as STL, MFC, or equivalent) takes at least another year.

Suffice it to say that most teachers won't be able to reach this level of mastery of the language. So what's the answer? How about assembler? That gets you to the bare metal... teaches you CPU architecture... can be used to teach recursion. Plus: pointers come included... for free!

Email or call your Computer Science school today and demand that assembler be taught to all CS majors as the introductory class. Now that's a weed-out class!

Assembler, dammit, assembler! Young whipper-snappers... ***grumbling noises***

Google's Secret Data Centers?


Everyone knows about Google's data center on the west coast. But they've reportedly got others scattered throughout the world. After my brother asked the question ("have you heard about the $750 million Google is spending on data centers throughout the US?"), I did a little -- why, yes -- googling to discover the following:

* Here's one from '04 near Atlanta

* Here's a report of one in the Netherlands

* And another report of one in Dublin, Ireland

And you may have seen rumors of Google's "data-center in a trailer" that can be drop-shipped anywhere there's fiber and set-up in hours. Those could obviously be located anywhere... if they're production-ready.

Are there more? Almost certainly. I'm sure Google stands these up as quietly as they can -- for both competitive and physical security reasons.

Death to the Cubicle!

The rigor around employee productivity and workplace design has always struck me as somewhat lacking. Does sticking everyone in a cubicle have an ROI? Some are now rethinking the merits of cubes and their impact on productivity.

"Dilbert was a real-estate effectiveness issue... the effectiveness of the employee is now worth more than the real estate."


read more | digg story

John Kerry Yodels for a Filibuster


The Best of the Web features this gem regarding the Alito confirmation. You'll recall, of course, that John Kerry -- speaking from a resort in Davos, Switzerland, called for a filibuster of Judge Alito. James Taranto remarks:

...of course the filibuster cannot succeed. Seven Democratic senators are on record as renouncing the filibuster except in "extraordinary circumstances," and it's hard to think of a circumstance more ordinary than Kennedy and Kerry behaving like fools.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Today's Thought Experiment


Here are two ledes. Can you tell which one represents the real news article -- and which is bogus?

1 A top Iraqi General revealed there were no WMDs in Iraq prior to the war:

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in the years prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Because he was, "responsible for the inventory of all major weapons systems," the official had intimate knowledge of Iraqi military capabilities.

The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Bush's Secrets," released this week. He detailed Saddam Hussein's insistence that the Iraqi military "come clean" to UN inspectors and also charged that Bush "misled the U.S. into a terrible mistake of a war."

"There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the war, and therefore they could not be found by the US or anyone else," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident that further investigation will prove this."


2 A top Iraqi General reported that Iraq airlifted WMDs into Syria just before the invasion of Iraq:

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.

"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over." Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."


* * *

Here's the answer to today's thought experiment: if the first article were true, you'd have seen it plastered on the front page of the New York Times -- and dozens of other major daily papers -- for weeks on end (remember Al Qaqaa?). The second article, however, really happened. Since it doesn't portray the Bush administration in an unflattering light, however, you won't see it anywhere near the the front page of most American dailies.

Thank you for participating in today's thought experiment.

p.s., And if you're wondering why Hussein ordered Sada to move the WMD's, just ask Jay Rockefeller. I sincerely hope Rockefeller is prosecuted to the maximum extent allowed by law if those allegations are true.

The A to Z of Programmer Predilictions


Funny article describing the 26 flavors of software developer. Here's a taste:

Generic George

George delights in the design process. Pathologically incapable of solving just the immediate problem at hand, George always creates the most generic, flexible and adaptable solution possible, paying for the capabilities he thinks he will need in the future with extra complexity now. Sadly, George always seems to anticipate incorrectly. The castles in the air that he continually builds rarely end up with more than a single room occupied. Meanwhile, everyone must cope with the inordinate degree of time and effort that is needlessly invested in managing the complexity of an implementation whose flexibility is never required. It is a usual characteristic of George's work that it takes at least a dozen classes working together to accomplish even trivial functionality. He is generally the first to declare "Let's build a framework" whenever the opportunity presents itself, and the last to want to use the framework thus created.


The A to Z of Programmer Predilictions

Couric uses brass knuckles on Howard Dean


Someone slap me on the butt and call me Sally. Katie Couric just pounded Howard Dean into a tiny spit-shaped drop of Vermont maple syrup on GMA. The topic? NSA international wiretaps. And I don't know what's gotten into Ms. Couric lately, but I like it .

Couric: "If this potentially stops another terrorist attack like 9/11, why not give the White House some latitude? ...Have you seen any evidence, Governor Dean, have you seen any evidence that this is happening, that the administration is somehow poking into the private lives of Americans?"

Dean: "...We don't believe you ought to spy on American citizens without some third party looking at this. That's what makes the difference between America and other countries like Iran." [Ed: uhm, yeah, that's the difference between us and Iran: international wiretaps... not threatening to wipe other countries off the map, torturing homosexuals, repressing people of other religions, funding suicide bombers, ...]
...
Couric: "You know a lot of people say the Democratic party at this point in time criticizes all and literally stands for nothing. Even James Carville and Paul Begala - you can't find two more hard-core Democrats than that, Governor Dean - in their book wrote that the Democratic party needs a backbone and a spinal transplant. So what do you think the Democratic party stands for at this point in time?"
...
Couric: "A new CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll shows 51% of registered voters say they would definitely not vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton for president if she runs in 2008. She's the front-runner among Democrats. Is that bad news in your view?"
...
Dean: "That's absolutely false, that did not happen. Not one dime of money from Jack Abramoff went to any Democrat at any time."

Couric: "Let me just tell you. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Abramoff and his associates gave $3 million to Republicans and $1.5 million to Democrats."


Wow. It's really kind of amazing to see the mainstream media grilling a leading Democrat, isn't it? I could really, really get used to this.

Google Confirms Testing Redesigned Results Page


This Antone Gonsalves article confirms what was reported here (and many other places) yesterday. Take a read of the article and then click the hyperlinked word "web". Don't get dizzy...