Displaying articles with tag politics
Posted by hank,
Fri Jul 25 09:44:00 UTC 2008
Oh man, what a day.
I attended quite a few talks, grabbed a lot of swag, and entered a few contests. I ended up buying the Arduino Starter Kit from MAKE so I can do some awesome embedded Ruby like I saw at FOSCON. It looks really fun - I can’t wait to try it out.
The talks I attended were half-way decent, but I learned a lot more on the first day.
A good overview of how one can use Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services to cheaply process and store data on a pretty large scale. The New York Times digitized hundreds of years of articles in a single day using these services and some awesome C++ code.
This ended up being a marketing talk. I don’t know what it had to do with cloud computing, and I didn’t stick around to find out.
An awesome overview of all the new stuff in Ruby 1.9 given by Sam Ruby. I had no idea they were changing so much, and this was a good dive with code examples into that. There was some discussion among everyone in the middle on whether for loops should work like .each blocks with regards to scope. I happen to disagree with what ended up being the popular thought on this subject. Most were advocating that a for loop constitutes a block, and that scope variables and iterators should be localized inside of it. This is contrary to almost every language, which I brought up using the example of C. Yet, when you iterate with .each, you immediately define a block and a scoped iterator, which, if it has a conflicting name with the outside world, it doesn’t matter since that’s out of scope. The only thing this changes is the value of a variable outside after the loop finishes. I think leaving the ability to modify a variable external to the loop is very convenient - in summary, leave it how you’ve done it in Ruby 1.9 already.
This was an interesting session on where Canonical is taking mobile technology, and what the community can do to help. They seem to have a pretty neat subnotebook coming out soon.
This could have been one of the best talks, but the speed at which it was given and the lack of enthusiasm in the presentation left most of us either bored or unfulfilled at the end of the talk. He spent the first half explaining what Python and C++ were, then he got to what SWIG is. The end was a quick dive into an extremely complicated bunch of files that didn’t help very much. In the future, it would be helpful to go to a SWIG talk that details how to make a simple Python extension with SWIG. I may have to throw that one together myself…
I also attended the tail end of Designing Political Web Apps for MoveOn.org, but I didn’t take any notes.
We ended up going to dinner at Widmer Brothers, which was pretty awesome. I had the Pork Schnitzel, a very tender piece of meat if I do say so myself, along with 2 Full Nelson IPAs. Afterwards, we caught the bus from the convention center to BeerForge and the SourceForge Community Choice Awards party. Beerforge was a blast. I ended up talking to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the developers of VLC, for hours - a truly great guy. I learned a lot about France and the French people, but also about VLC. Apparently, you can use VLC from the command line much like mplayer, which I did not know. Yet, he explained that they removed Directshow support from VLC in Linux in favor of open source alternatives, which in part I can understand. Yet, the only codec available that is able to smoothly play 1080p h264 video is closed source (CoreAVC), and until the ffmpeg avc codec catches up, I’ll have to continue using mplayer. When I can play everything back smoothly with VLC, I may consider switching.
The beer at BeerForge was pretty good - I had the IPA. SourceForge had some sort of mixed drink which wasn’t too great. All in all, a good day, but now I’m dehydrated…
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Fri Jul 11 01:24:00 UTC 2008
Ayn Rand brings up an interesting point about Robin Hood in Atlas Shrugged. She argues that Robin Hood is remembered for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor based on need, and that this is not the correct way to think about the tale. Robin Hood indeed did rob from the rich and gave to the poor, but not because the poor simply needed money, but because the money had been stolen from them by the rulers. This is a subtle, but extremely good point. Robin Hood was simply giving people back their property, which they earned, that was stolen using overbearing taxation. In fact, theoretically, he should have been robbing from the ruling class and giving to all taxpayers the same amount they paid in taxes, assuming a progressive or income-proportional tax system. This would include people from the middle class, such as merchants, as well as the poor.
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Fri Jul 04 12:31:00 UTC 2008
As I’ve been reading various books, an idea keeps popping up.
Suddenly radio playlists, MTV, and A&R guys aren’t
the all-powerful gatekeepers anymore. At long last the music industry
is becoming a democracy.
In our governmental systems, we elect representatives to make decisions for us, sending them to Washington to write bills, oppose bills, pass bills, or veto bills. We ideally find candidates who will make similar decisions to those we ourselves would make. We elect them in a process called democracy (unless it’s a presidential election, in which case the popular vote only determines a winner-takes-all vote for the state, allowing the electoral votes to originate from one party or another). In government, a direct legislative rule by the people is as dangerous as a direct legislative rule by any tyrant. In a country where we preach equal treatment of any minority, we cannot have raw majority rule, where fear of the majority silences all those who might oppose it out of fear of rejection, blasphemy, or outright violence.
Continue Reading
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Thu Jun 12 00:21:00 UTC 2008
These guys are my new heroes. They objectively evaluate the situation in Sudan/Darfur simply by going there with a camera and asking people questions. It turns out that what most Americans believe is going on there may be a bit skewed…
All the rest are inside…
Continue Reading
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Wed May 28 14:46:00 UTC 2008
After seeing this, I couldn’t help myself:
The ideal candidate according to America
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Tue Mar 18 22:28:00 UTC 2008
So, there I was, wondering what the Founding Fathers of these united States were thinking when they scrawled the 2nd amendment into the paper, wording it so ambiguously (at least in today’s grammar). Maybe they wrote it down in another form somewhere else… Maybe at the Virginia Convention of June 27, 1788!
Keep in mind that these were simply proposed amendments, so one could feasibly argue that they later decided that people shouldn’t have guns, but they should word it in Latin Grammar so it’s really confusing…
From page 221 of my Anti-Federalist Papers:
17th. That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit. And that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
This is from the guys who fought for the Bill of Rights. If it wasn’t for these guys, we wouldn’t have many of the other freedoms we enjoy, like the following:
15th. Right to peaceable assembly, redress of grievances
16th. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press
20th. Freedom of religion
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Sun Mar 16 19:03:00 UTC 2008
I find these figures interesting. It seems that many of the happiest countries in the first world are near the top (US, UK, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany), which means they have more crime than many more disadvantaged countries. It also seems that many of the countries with the least crime have very strong religious influences in their government, while the top is mostly “free and prosperous”. But what is extremely interesting is how I’ve been hearing that England has less crime than we do. It plainly doesn’t when taken per capita. They have about 6% more crime currently. It’s amazing to me since they have all these measures to curb it such as spy cameras on every corner of London.
Hopefully, no politicians will elect to start this invasive Orwellian crap here. It obviously doesn’t work.
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Thu Jan 10 08:43:00 UTC 2008
Tags: politics
Posted by hank,
Wed Jan 09 18:47:00 UTC 2008
I was reading the Republican Party platform of 1860 today, which is about 1.5 pages, very broadly worded, and actually has good general platform aims. It was an interesting contrast to the 2004 platform, which is very specific and verbose and specific about every possible issue, 92 pages, and full of praise for George W. Bush. The old platform is much less superficial - it actually lays down the underlying principles that the party aims to achieve, some of which have been ignored by later platforms, the following being particularly powerful:
That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.
So, why has the party changed so much? Maybe the 2008 platform should be minimal, only stating the underlying principles behind the individual policies in the 2004 platform. Any intelligent person should be able to conclude from the minimal set of principles what the party’s policy would be on a particular issue. The 1860 platform seemed to recognize this.
Tags: politics
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