Allen March 31st, 2004
The inestimable Steven Den Beste examines Mercurial America in reviewing an IHT article by John Vinocur entitled Europe in for a letdown if it’s counting on Kerry .
Read the IHT article first to read the common misconception held by most Europeans. If Kerry wins, America will go back to be subservient to the wishes of Europe. The problem, of course, is that America has never been subservient to Europe. As SDB has pointed out in the past, although a lot of us (particularly our Founding Fathers) are from Europe, we must remember that we escaped from Europe.
If you examine the thoughts and policy positions of ranking Democrats, you don’t really find much difference between them and Bush. This causes no end of grief to people like Noam Chimpsky, but these are the facts of life, thank God. I wish the Dhimitude European Union the best of luck, but I do not wish to follow their lead.
From Mercurial America:
There’s also a tendency in Europe to engage in projection, and to think of America as being Europe’s child, a rebellious teenager. Once we Americans “grow up”, we’ll realize that they were right all along, but in the mean time this is just a phase that all children go through.
The evidence from history is that all these assumptions are false. They ignore that evidence; they explain it away by saying that America has changed. Even if the nation was willing to sacrifice 400,000 dead in WWII, that was then and this is now, and modern Americans are different.
So they discount the fact that America remained steadfast during the entire Cold War despite both parties electing Presidents during that interval. There were differences in style and approach towards how the Cold War should be handled, but never any doubt that it would be handled, no matter which party held the White House.
And they discount the degree to which our system maintains continuity of policy. Even if Kerry wins this year, there’s still essentially no chance of the Democrats regaining control of the House, and that would mean that the Democrats would have to compromise on foreign policy even if they thought the way the Europeans somehow hope they do.
Allen March 31st, 2004
I received the following from a co-worker about Java, written by a Java developer, James Turner. Read Why Do Java Developers Like to Make Things So Hard? for the full article.
Java is a great language. But for some reason, the Java community has decided to take it and make all the ancillary packages as complex and difficult to use as possible. It’s like a racehorse that’s had a wet bar and a hot tub mounted on it. The Perl folks have the right idea. Make supporting technologies that are simple to use, rather than so elegant that they become incomprehensible.
Imagine if the Perl cafe and Javahut were across the street from each other. You walk into Javahut, and ask to sit down. “I’m sorry,” says the person at the door. I’m not actually the hostess, I’m a Factory class that can give you a hostess if you tell me what type of seat you want.” You say you want a non-smoking seat, and the person calls over a NonSmokingSeatHostess. The hostess takes you to your seat, and asks if you’ll want breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You say lunch, and she beckons a LunchWaitress. The LunchWaitress takes your order, brings over your food, but there’s no plates to put it on because you forgot to get a CutleryFactory and invoke getPlates, so the Waitress throws a null pointer exception and you get thrown out of the place.
Dusting yourself off, you walk across the street to the Perl cafe. The person at the door asks what kind of seat you want, what you want to eat, and how you want to pay. They sit you at your seat, bring over your food, collect the money, and leave you to eat in peace. Sure, it’s not the most elegant dining experience you ever had, but you got your food with a minimum of pain.
The long and the short of it is that, in my opinion, Java is a great language being destroyed by Rampaging Computer Science. There’s a time for elegance, and a time for usability. If developers want to make the internals of packages flexible and extensible, that’s all well and good. But the external interfaces should be clean, simple to use, and have wrappers for the most commonly accessed functionality. For example, in a PGP package, I should be able to encrypt or decrypt a file in 5 lines of code or less. After all, I can do it in Perl in 3.
As both a Java and Perl developer, I can attest to the frustration felt by Mr. Turner. Perl was written for purpose (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language). It may not be elegant, but it gets the job done. Java seems to be written for the purpose of religion.
Allen March 31st, 2004
Washing Times has an op/ed piece by Jean-Christophe Mounicq entitled Terror and Tolerance. Spewing forth intolerance with every sentence, Jean-Christophe seems to start every sentence with “I can no longer tolerate”.
I just can’t figure out why someone is intolerant of this sort of behavior. I don’t understand why someone can’t tolerate this. And just because this happens, Jean-Christophe spouts off. The man is a mass of intolerance!
What? What’s that you say?
Oh, perhaps tolerance of evil is not a good thing?
Hmmmm….
Allen March 31st, 2004
Todd Pearson at Centerfield concurrs with Michael Totten as he examines the 911 committee and sees nothing but partisan bickering. Democrats seeking to destroy Republicans and Republicans seeking to blame Democrats. No-one is interested in determining the root causes. No-one seems to be seeking a way to determine why we had this endemic failure of our society to see the danger. No-one seems to be interested in the future. In how we currently face the dangers ahead of us. Read Centerfield: BLAME GAME for Todd’s look at the events.
Allen March 31st, 2004
Many people are familiar with SmartMoney.com’s Map of the Market. (No link available as this is a javascript pop-up). It displays a map of the stock market, broken into sectors. The size of each tile is a function of the market cap of the particular stock while the color is based upon the trendline of the stock price. Red means the stock is going down while green means the stock is headed up. Shading is based upon percentage change. A really cool application.
Marcos Weskamp (along with Dan Albritton) has a newsmap application in a similar vein. It maps news stories, again by sectors, with various news sources available (it defaults to stories from US new services). The size of the tile is based upon the number of articles, the color is based upon the the sector and the shade based upon how old the article is.
Pretty cool.
Allen March 31st, 2004
Still been extremely busy lately. As some of you may know, the business where I work is shutting down our location here in Oklahoma City. I’ve had some sessions with the outplacement firm hired by my company and I’ve been working with them.
Not that it seems to matter that much. My original termination date of the end of April has been pushed (no surprise) to beginning of November. It turns out the IT systems we created to support this complex item we make is, well, rather complex.
I’m still catching up from vacation and so will continue to blog sporadically. I’ve got some draft posts that I’m trying to finish up.
Allen March 26th, 2004
Salon (ad-based registration required) has an article Salon.com News | “We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001″ about an FBI translator who claims that the FBI did have warning about 9/11. She claims that she has been hushed by Ashcroft for speaking out. She is scheduled to testify more before Congress.
She is also the translator who claimed that the head of the translation department was telling his workers to slow down the pace of work in order to frustrate efforts of the FBI to obtain relevant information regarding terrorist plans.
I’m not so much concerned that we had prior 9/11 warnings. We might well have had warnings regarding the plans, but the amount of information available could have precluded action. In other words, with a sea of data in which to work, the data regarding 9/11 only stands out after the fact.
The FBI simply cannot follow up on every lead that they come across.
More interesting is Ashcroft’s response attempting to squelch her testimony. I’m more interested in this than any witch hunt attempting to place blame on 9/11.
Here’s a thought….
The ones to blame for 9/11 is al-Qaida. Let’s keep that in mind.
Allen March 26th, 2004
Silfay Hraka has an article that likens the the US to the Orkin Man. Read Silflay Hraka: Ask The Orkin Man for the full article.
The money quote?
America excels at asking “What if” questions. The terrorism classes at George Mason and elsewhere are the results of that ability. Al-Qaeda may see the U.S. as a Great Satan, but when it comes down to it, the country as a whole is more like a white-coated lab technician. First we study the noxious bug in order to learn its ways, ask how it might behave in a given environment, and then come up with ways to kill it.
America isn’t the world’s policeman. It’s the Orkin man.
I love it!
Allen March 26th, 2004
Porphyrogenitus examines China’s likelihood to transition to a democracy and doesn’t see much hope. Read Porphy’s Paranoia About China for the full article.
I agree with Porphy’s arguments regarding China and see a dark future ahead. While China is a economic powerhouse, the house is built on a fault-line. Several troubling facts point toward a clash between China and the West and within China itself.
China’s attempts to reign in democracy in Hong Kong. The call for only the “right type” of candidates sounds like something out of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
China has now implemented property rights (in the constitution if I remember properly), but is still mum regarding rights of free speech and assembly. As long as someone can accuse you of a thought crime, I don’t see property rights as being all that strong
At some point a Chinese business person (or foreign corporation) will be too large for China’s oligarchy to tolerate. They don’t have a good track record when it comes to tolerance.
Allen March 26th, 2004
Walter at Overlawyered discusses a bill introduced by Senator Graham in the article Overlawyered: Sen. Graham introduces loser-pays bill. Given the site title, you don’t have to wonder where Walter is on this side of the argument.
The law, as currently written, only kicks in (that is, the loser pays court costs) only if a settlement was offered. I would like to see if there is some sort of floor for the settlement offer, but I feel this is moving in the right direction. Obviously, if someone’s spouse is brain-damaged because of a faulty product and the settlement offered is $2,000, this doesn’t make sense.
But this will have a chilling effect on suit-happy plaintiffs seeking to get a free meal pass at the expense of businesses. It exposes the lie of lawyers who claim, “If you don’t win, you won’t pay anything”. Yes, under current rules, the plaintiff doesn’t pay (society does). Now the plaintiffs will have “some skin in the game”. Those who have a strong case will hang tough. Those who are looking to cash in for a quick buck will perhaps look elsewhere for a way to earn money.
Of course, there will be apologists who will wring their hands at how the poor down-trodden masses will not be able to go after those wicked, cruel business-scum. Take a step back and breathe for a second, OK? Let us grant that there are business people out to make a quick buck by selling shoddy goods and services. But if we do that, shouldn’t we also grant that there are lying scum out to make a quick buck by suing anyone and everyone in sight?
[Via Ipse Dixit]