30 December 07 - 11:37Huckabee: Rrgh.
Just
read it.
I find it massively hypocritical that Republicans can bash on Muslim theocracies for being unenlightened while this kind of insane bullshit is actually up for contention for their Presidential nomination. At least if he wins, the GOP will crash and burn pretty quickly.
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28 December 07 - 18:40F# and LINQ
The latest version of F# pulls a no-brainer and
adds LINQ support. I think those of you who have been fiddling with both F# and LINQ will be suitably pleased, although it's not readily apparent to me how LINQ gives me benefits over the existing F# functionality.
I'm still curious at how "eighty-percenters" (and even a lot of "twenty-percenters") will respond to F# being included in an eventual VS release (VS 2010?). Already, there's a lot of push-back on LINQ which seems completely illogical (although the performance concerns are baffling -- Promit informs me they haven't even implemented constant folding yet). I'll definitely be contributing to our local coding standards with a lot of encouragement towards using LINQ heavily, although I do understand that a number of my coworkers have been trained excessively heavily in the OO cult. Oh, Java. What have you done to our fair science?
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28 December 07 - 13:18A rare two-fer
Normally I wouldn't post
another political link on the same day, but here we go.
One of Giuliani's political aides says we have to "chase [the Muslims] back to their caves." What's more, he said this while on camera and (supposedly) sober. Check it out:
HURR HURR RISE OF THE MUSLIMS FNAR.
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28 December 07 - 11:58Huckabee: Pakistan is West of Afghanistan
Come on, people. Even Southern Baptist preachers have no excuse for not knowing
this stuff.
Maybe I should start a "Huckabee" section just so we can take it all off the front page. This man's ignorance is astounding; I suspect he's only being taken seriously because the other front-line contenders for the nomination have all self-destructed in agonizing slow motion.
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25 December 07 - 16:43Hahah. Hah. Hahahahah.
And these are his
friends.
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24 December 07 - 17:30Huckabee: Seriously, WTF?
Is it actually possible that someone this stupid could be running for President?
But at least he's not
Romney.
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20 December 07 - 18:52Vocabulary rant
Idiots, if you can repair the machine yourself,
it's not bricked. I've noticed this kind of idiocy has really taken off since Apple decided to rush out iPhone patches that kill their hardware after someone's been futzing with the system files. The whining articles complaining about their expensive toys becoming "bricked" have obviously appealed to the hack writers out there. Perhaps Fox has already started to greenlight a drama named after it.
No doubt someone (or several someones) have copy-pasted this information into a Digg post and are quickly squabbling in the comments about how HP sucks compared to Apple, or some other such inanity.
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16 December 07 - 22:56People More Internet Savvy Than The Republican Party, Part VII
Maybe now we can get Bush to
bomb Web 2.0
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13 December 07 - 10:37Politicians and Second Life: Why?
Why do American politicians insist on attending
Second Life events? Is it because it's graphically appealing (and so their Uncanny Valley puppets will appear in the news section of
Time)? Do they think that voters who are knowledgable on high-tech issues spend their entire lives in SL? Are SL users somehow the intelligentsia of the Internet?
Perhaps it's because the alternative to playing photo-op in Foofy Furry Wonderland is
fixing this.
When was the last time a politician showed up to GameDev, or even Slashdot or Digg? Do they just like being assaulted by disembodied flying phalluses? If that's the case, you'd think there'd be more Republicans on SL.
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12 December 07 - 10:26Don't Write Tutorials
Josh comes out and says it:
tutorials suck ass.
I've seen some remarkably useless tutorials (like the "video tutorial" on Digg that teaches you how to make text bold -- let's waste 5+MB of bandwidth and who knows how much electricity to tell people how to write
<B>), and in general I consider them a waste of bandwidth and programmer effort. However, since most of them are penned by the virtually braindead, I doubt they would be otherwise productive if they weren't occupied with writing sub-par tutorials.
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09 December 07 - 17:03The Religious Right in America: Small, or just small-minded?
One of my favorite memes about the American people is that they are intellectually dominated by the religious right. This can't possibly be true, as the majority of my American friends are secular progressives who understand international affairs. Indeed, how would people who characterize the American people as small-minded Judeo-Christian bigots explain how Democrats ever get elected, as opposed to the Pavlovian tendencies of the Republicans?
The simplest explanation is that certain members of the religious right have a ton of money. Take a look at the
Benny Hills and
Jerry Falwells of the world. They have obscene
boatloads of money. That kind of money can buy a lot of political support for your message, and perception is reality.
My personal theory is that the "religious right is strong" meme is being propagated by the religious right themselves. How many times have you heard "
X is a Christian nation!*" or something along those lines? By pretending that the US isn't secular, and is in fact deeply Christian, certain conservative outlets can unify their die-hard religious crowd together, claiming then that secular progressives are in fact the
minority, and that they should actively oppose them in their "holy war" against the Muslims (or gay dads, or abortion-receiving females, or black people, or whatever). They can also imply (through other news outlets reporting on the initial message) that a vote for actual progressives is "wasted" because the religious right will outvote them 10 to 1.
If we can reverse this perception that bigots like Jerry Falwell control the
majority of the voting populace, maybe we can get someone into office who doesn't spend 90% of his time claiming
how big of a Christian he is. We might also be able to firmly and plainly justify the separation of church and state (apparently the Constitution isn't quite clear enough), which would be a massive step forward in terms of reforming
electoral fundraising.
* Many Americans are ignorant of the effect that electing a given official will have on other countries. Even if this fact were true, other nations are not Christian nations, and shouldn't be taken in a secondary light to domestic concerns. Why do you think I care about the US enough to post about it? I don't live there.
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06 December 07 - 06:54Pointless Intertrons Quizzes I
GamePolitics, the ever-incensed pool of angry sub-literate videogamers, has found itself to write at
a post-graduate level. Presumably this implies the readers aren't stupid, which seems questionable. I mean, look at any Jack Thompson thread --
Jack Thompson is more astute than many of them!
In the interest of full disclosure, it ranked this very blog as a "junior high" level. I suspect their writing-quality indicator is tied a bit more to humanities terms than computer science and creative profanity. So I guess my readers are dumb, infantile and acne-ridden. No surprises here, then.
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