The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I much preferred the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy over Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. The latter was violent and evil, while the former was good fun. Of course, it is enough of a cult phenomenon that my wife and her friend were somewhat perplexed by it. If you are a purist, you might object to what was done with the Hitchhiker, but we had the benefit of Douglas Adams having been involved before he died.

Jerry Pournelle has a good piece about Global Warming

Jerry Pournelle writes about a subject that interests me: Global Warming. He points out that in the past, we have had periods of warmer weather:

But the facts remain: the warming trend was going on well before the CO2 levels began escalating. The Earth has been both warmer and cooler in historical times. Computer models produce predictions, but none of those models can duplicate the past (start with 1900 and run a 100 year projection that "predicts" the realities of the Year 2000; or start with 1950 and predict 2000 with the model; or heck, just give us a good picture of what is going to happen next year, or this summer). Observation scientists tend to be less enthusiastic about the "consensus" and many reject it entirely. And there are counter-trends: We don't know if we are headed for an Ice Age or Global Warming, but for a while at least Warming produces a more benign world with more resources to spend. And the return of the Ice Ages would be very bad.

Sarbanes-Oxley

If there is anythingholding back business right now, it is the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. It was enacted in a burst of demagoguery, starting in 2001, made possible by the Enron and World Com scenarios. The Democrats in Congress were doing everything they could to make trouble for President Bush and the Republicans in Congress, and they seized on the Enron collapse as one possible solution. It ultimately failed in the primary motivation, but it still had the consequence of torpedoing business. It was made possible by the Republicans feeling that they had to show that they were as strong against business excesses as the Democrats. Now, we are stuck with a bad bargain that is hurting the economy and country. Not that you would know it by listening to the various news outlets.

Jane Galt on European Unity and the Euro

Megan McArdle ("Jane Galt") has a post on the danger to the Euro from economic differences between European countries. As was just mentioned to me, countries have lost the ability to "print money" to jump start their economies. Italy is in the grip of stagflation, she writes.

I'll tell you what is a big deal for the EU, though: the euro. The disparities between euro-zone economies are not shrinking as everyone had hoped; in some places, they're growing. That is making it nearly impossible to craft monetary policy that is both hawkish on inflation, and doesn't throw huge economies (i.e. Italy and Germany) deeper into the slough of economic despond. Italy, meanwhile, is managing to disprove the adage that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" by having stagflation, a recession, and an inflation hawk at the monetary helm. If the euro falls apart, it could have major repercussions for the EU, as it would be a full scale retreat from "ever-closer union".

Jacques Corriveau denies that the payments were kickbacks

Jacques Corriveau now says, contrary to what he had said in April, before the Gomery Commission, that he had not made kickbacks to the Liberal Party. The Globe and Mail has the story, this time by the "Canadian Press".

A graphic designer denied at the sponsorship inquiry Monday that paying the salaries of three Liberal party staffers was a scheme to divert sponsorship profits to the federal party.

Jacques Corriveau, a long-time party organizer and friend of Jean Chrétien, said he took on the Liberal workers in 1998, before he realized sponsorship subcontracts would earn him millions.

Marc Cooper gets around and rubs shoulders with celebrities

Marc Cooper writes that we just passed the 19th anniversity of the drunkest he has ever gotten. He had done a Playboy interview with Oliver Stone. You also find out a lot more about Oliver Stone, his morals, and his buddies (more than I wanted to know).

I’ll leave any comment on the voting in France and Lebanon, the revoltin’ Bolton, and the war in Iraq for after Monday.

I continue in holiday mode and reserve the right to be frivolous. Anyway, this weekend is the precise 19^th anniversary of the drunkest I ever got. The story even has a celebrity news hook. Because the drunkest I ever got was with Oliver Stone. Yes, the same Stone who unwittingly commemorated that same event the other night by getting busted for DUI out on the Sunset Strip.

Anyway, it was on another Memorial Day weekend, in 1987, that I found myself in South Hampton finishing up a marathon Playboy magazine interview with Oliver Stone. (The finished product is hard to find online so as an act of public welfare I am offering a full-text version of the interview which you can find at the bottom of this posting ).

Oliver had just won his Oscar for Platoon and he was out in the Hamptons on the set of Wall Street. I had already spent a couple of days with him earlier in the year in Santa Monica laying down some tape. I followed him to the Hamptons to ask the final follow-ups.

If you are a voyeur, you might read the rest of Marc's post.

Jeff Jarvis LIKES moderates and compromises

Jeff Jarvis, of Buzz Machine, apparently likes moderates and the sort of compromize that the gang of 14 did. He writes:

Howard Kurtz writes that blog coverage of the moderate revolution was filled with anger from the right and left while mainstream media celebrated the moderation (as did I... apparently because I am either strange or mainstream, take your pick). He's onto something.

He concludes:

What this split in coverage really indicates, as Kurtz says, is the essential difference between big and citizens' media (and I'm repeating myself): because newspapers are institutional and blogs are personal, newspapers try to be dispassionate while blogs are passionate.

And that's what we see in the coverage of what I hope to call the moderate revolution: Blogs speak up when they have cause to be pissed about or to celebrate over but rarely to be moderate and thus dull. The big press has to cover the story and thinks it has to see both sides; it likes to show both sides yelling but, of course, it doesn't want to be caught yelling itself.

My reaction is that events of the last week were caused by a combination of the political ambitions of Senator McCain and the increasing restlessness of liberal Republicans.

Keith Thompson, at Sane Nation writes about transcending left and right in politics

Keith Thompson has a blog called Sane Nation. He has a series of posts about transcending left and right in political discussions. The last is called Beyond Left and Right. The one before that is called "Binary Myopia". On Monday he wrote about a conversation that he had on the radio:

Yes, that was me speaking to Rush Limbaugh live a few moments ago. I was the one celebrating Bobby Kennedy. Rush was the one who was remembering Hubert Humphrey with respect. So it goes in the amazing political landscape called America. Who knew?

Marc Cooper on the new Leftist McCarthyism

Marc Cooper is my favorite leftist intellectual. Michael J. Totten had pointed him out to us quite a few months ago. Marc's credentials as a leftist are impeccable. He got thrown out of the California university system by Ronald Reagan, and then went to work for Salvador Allende, in Chile. He is married to a Chilean socialist, his daughter is a "notorious union organizer" and he is an editor for The Nation. He writes about how a segment of the left have become "Leninist Liberals". Max Blumenthal, Sid's son, has been slandering Christopher Hitchins, accusing him of having Nazi sympathies (!), which is amazing enough. Mark concludes:

With the rise and fall of Clintonism, however, many of these libs have morphed into quite bitter and resentful street fighters who have adopted their own form of red-baiting (if we understand red to mean, for example, red-staters). These Leninist Liberals are ready to purge anyone who steps out of line either to their right or left. Satanize Ralph Nader because he took away all those votes from Al Gore. Hang (or smear) Christopher Hitchens, the once-left apostate who now supports Bush and his war. Leninists certainly not in any ideological way--but rather in assimilating that old-time leftist sectarianism (on second thought maybe this is wholly appropriate for a failing Democratic Party that seems headed to becoming only a sect).

I’m all for disagreement and heated, no-holds-barred debate and polemics. Take on anyone you damn well please. But do it with some solid arguments and some sound reasoning. Not with slander and innuendo.

I’m told that Hitchens is currently overseas and will soon be responding to Blumenthal’s second smear. In this match-up, my bet is third round win for Hitchens by KO. It wasn't really a fair fight from the outset.

Jerry Pournelle has a piece about offshoring work

Jerry Pournelle has the text for an article entitled "Four Big Lies About Offshoring". The article concludes:

Global sourcing creates greater opportunity for all parties and countries involved by allowing more developed economies to innovate, while allowing developing countries to get into the game and begin growing themselves. In essence, offshoring is essential for global business growth. And the U.S. steel industry is a good example of the fate awaiting U.S. companies that turn a blind eye.

“Outsourcing and offshoring aren’t optional, and they pose as many opportunities as they do risks,” says Wesker. “Innovative companies need to get over the fear factor and implement new processes to manage offshoring’s risks in order to stay competitive and prosper.”

Marc Cooper has a good column about the Senate

Marc Cooper has a good sense of humour. He has written a column in the LA Weekly called: Dissonance: Back from the Fallout Shelter. He claims to be disappointed that the Republicans didn't resort to the "Nuclear Option". He starts off by writing:

I confess to a certain disappointment that the Senate didn’t get all the way to DEFCON 1 this week and let loose that damned nuclear option. Listening to the esteemed colleagues on C-SPAN radio all day Monday, I got so steamed up and anxious for Dear Leader Frist to finally push the big button that I’ve now sunk into post- bipartisan-agreement depression. I’m all bundled up in my asbestos suit but with nowhere to go.

He concludes:

The real lesson of this past week’s farce, the most uncomfortable one and therefore the most likely to be overlooked, is that the best way for Democrats to get better judicial nominations is to start figuring out how to win presidential elections. (With Hillary already in virtual campaign mode, I would expect no immediate breakthroughs on that front.)

As to the rest of us, well, here we are, left with our smoked-lens glasses on, staring at the TV screen with nary a mushroom cloud in the blue summer sky.

The French appear poised to defeat the EU constitution

In a slap to Jacques Chirac, the French appear ready to defeat the EU constitution in the coming vote. The Times Online has the story. The referendum will be this Sunday.

THE leader of France’s ruling party has privately admitted that Sunday’s referendum on the European constitution will result in a “no” vote, throwing Europe into turmoil.

“The thing is lost,” Nicolas Sarkozy told French ministers during an ill-tempered meeting. “It will be a little ‘no’ or a big ‘no’,” he was quoted as telling Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, whom he accused of leading a feeble campaign.

Although Europe would be thrown into disarray, the Government would be greatly relieved if M Sarkozy were right.

Ministers have privately told The Times that Britain is prepared to ditch its commitment to a referendum if France, or the Netherlands next Wednesday, vote against the constitution. They believe that if the French say “no”, President Chirac will have to declare the constitution dead or promise a renegotiation.

I still believe that the move to unifying Europe politically happened because of both Germany's and France's desire to control Europe. My theory is that each believes that they are superior, so they will naturally dominate the unified continent. They would achieve by election and politics what they could not achieve by force of arms. It is a bad idea, though, because Europe is so diverse, and each country has its own political and economic needs. They don't need unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels dictating policies that are contrary to their own needs.

How states compare with other countries

Andrew Roth at Club for growth about how American states compare with foreign countries.

Georgia Is Bigger Than Georgia?

If the American states were independent countries, California (8), New York (16), Texas (17), and Florida (19), would all rank in the Top 20 according to Gross Domestic Product.

Georgia, the American state, is 21 times larger than Georgia, the country that was formerly part of the Soviet Union ($320B vs. $15B).

South Dakota’s GDP is larger than Cuba’s ($26.5B vs. $25.9B) even though Cuba has 14 times as many people (770,000 vs. 11.3M).

Nebraska’s GDP is 60% larger than Libya’s ($65.7B vs. $41B) even though Libya has more than 3 times as many people (1.7M vs. 5.7M)

Indiana and Sweden have roughly the same GDP, but Sweden has almost 50% more people (6.2M vs. 9M).

Zephyr Teachout has a piece about her working theory about the world

I hope that Zephyr Teachout will return to regular posting. She has a new piece at Zonkette. Oddly enough, she is my favorite leftist activist.

As anyone I've run into recently know, I have a working meta-theory of the world -- working not as in, "it works!" but working as in, "i'm workin on it, ok? not true, not perfect, but maybe useful..."

The idea is that there are three ascendant forces in the world -- multinational corporations, radical theocracy, and civic democracy. Whichever one of these three figures out how to use the collective action solving power of the internet the best-- well, wins. Defines world history for the next few centuries. Dominates.

Which is why I've been studying Al Qaeda's use of the internet and thinking about ways for small businesses to solve their collective action problems visavis multinationals.

She has a vision about how the Internet could help like-minded people connect and work together on common causes:

Yet most politically oriented sites make you feel more like a passenger stuck in traffic, not a driver with a CB. You are allowed to do certain things – sign up to volunteer, contribute, read—maybe even send a letter to the editor. But for the most part, you are not given the tools to reach out and talk to the other people who happen by that site with you.

Even on the sites that allow commenting – which are great – I don’t feel quite part of a human crowd, because the only way I can interact is by giving a speech to all assembled – when want to do is pull aside a fellow-wanderer and whisper questions and jokes about what we are seeing.

Imagine if upon going to Oxfam’s website, for example, I could see all the other people who were also visiting, choose those I wanted to talk to, make plans to meet up with them later. Imagine, too, if I could look at the aspects of the Oxfams’ projects and brainstorm with other people I see there about what we could do about it.

To that end, I think we have barely begun seeing what the internet will do – the question is who will do it. I believe the groups that use the internet in the next few years to obsess about creating continuous offline communities will have disproportionate political power in years to come.

As long as we’re on the information superhighway, why can’t we all have CB’s?

A study supports Brault's story

A new study supports Jean Brault's claims that he supplied funds to the Liberals. The Globe and Mail has the article by U Thanh Ha and Daniel LeBlanc.

Montreal and Ottawa — A key report released at the Gomery inquiry yesterday bolsters the allegations of advertising executive Jean Brault that he made illicit donations to Liberal organizers.

The report, by the forensic accounting firm Kroll Lindquist Avey, says that the owners of nine well-connected agencies who benefited from the federal sponsorship program, paid themselves during that period more than $51-million in salaries and bonuses.

Air America casualty: replaced by Jerry Springer

JB Doubtless, from Fraters Libertas, writes about Lizz Winstead, a Minnesotan who was let go from Air America. She is suing for back pay, vacation, and severance pay. Her show, "Unfiltered", was replaced by Jerry Springer. JB Doubtless writes:

$200 g's? Not bad. Problem is you actually have to collect it, which doesn't sound like it's very easy. I'd hate to have to say that they are replacing me with a Jerry Springer re-run. Ouch.

Leftist talk radio and television

On NPR, on "All Things Considered" they had the story about public broadcasting excecutives complaining about pressure to make their coverage balanced. The last thing that they want to have to do is be balanced. They seem to be angry that anyone would restrict their ability to promote leftist ideology. The story on the NPR website is titled "CEO Mitchell Says PBS Will Resist Political Pressure".

Pat Mitchell manages PBS, the non-profit media enterprise operated by the nation's 349 public television stations. Mitchell addresses the National Press Club amid recent efforts by Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which subsidizes PBS and NPR -- to address what he says is a liberal bias in public broadcasting.

She wants to protect Bill Moyers to broadcast "hate television". It is sad that Bill Moyers would be presented with public money. I don't like his message, but if my taxpayer dollars weren't involved, I would have less problem with what he is doing.

Talk about craziness

This is about the craziest thing that I have heard about. Only our buddies on the extremist left could even think of such a thing, much less try to make it happen. If you like GLBT, then you will like this. Ann Althouse writes:

The city of Eugene, Oregon is about to consider banning discrimination based on "gender identity." Among other things, it would become illegal to deny transgendered persons their choice of whether to use the men's or the women's public bathroom

You would think it was a joke, but these people are dead serious. Save us from the leftist extremists.

Java Development specific: what do you do when Eclipse won't start?

I have run into this a number of times over the last two years, while doing development using the Eclipse IDE. You get into a situation where you try to launch Eclipse and you get an error message saying "An error has occurred" and then directing you to look at a log file. That file, it turns out, is in the .metadata directory. The problem is that the metadata is corrupted. The simple thing to do is to rename your workspace and relaunch Eclipse. You will get a new workspace, and then import your projects into the new from the old workspace. That works like a charm, and is quick and easy. I did a great deal of searching with Google, and there is not such a straight forward explanation anywhere that I looked.

Darth Sidious (John McCain) is firmly on the Dark Side

There is no surprise in John McCain being on the "Dark Side". John McCain, of Keating Five fame, seems determined to win the hearts and minds of the left. He is the Republican Party's "Sith". The so-called compromise is really a non-compromise. To the naive observer, it is indistinguishable from a sellout. Ace calls it "The Dirty Deal". He writes: "Thank you, John McCain, for continuing to care so much about liberal media opinion and for continuing to suffer under the delusion that we're going to allow a Napoleon-complexed strutting peacock like you to be our President."

A new blog about marketing: Marketing Thoughts

There is a new blog devoted to marketing called "Marketing Thoughts". Claire describes their ten rules of marketing. She writes: "The ultimate conclusion of marketing is selling a product and making a profit. Following the rules will help you stick to the basic principles of good marketing."

John McCain maintains his liberal credentials

John McCain does it again. He lead the supposed compromise where the Republicans caved and let the Democrats block some of President Bush's nominees, without having a vote. Ed Morrissey has the sad story. Another reason I deeply regret my vote for McCain during the 2000 primary season. Ed writes:

This, in short, has been a clear victory for the Democrats and a massive failure for the GOP and the White House. The GOP just endorsed the filibuster, and will have no intellectual capacity to argue against its use later on. They sold the Constitution just to get less than half of its blockaded nominees through, and the result will be much less flexibility on future Supreme Court nominations.

Greg Costikyan likes 2D games better than 3D (at least for certain genres)

Greg Costikyan, on his blog Games * Design * Art * Culture explains why he prefers 2D versions of games over 3D: "Why 3D is Not Always a Good Idea".

One of the most cost-effective game purchases I ever made was Heroes of Might & Magic III. I'm a fan of turn-based fantasy games in general, and it was probably the best ever published of its genre. I played literally every campaign and every individual scenario on the disc. And 3DO did well off of me, too; I bought every expansion pack for the game (and there were quite a few). Heroes III was a 2D game; when Heroes IV came out, I instantly bought it--and put it aside rather quickly. It was 3D. It may have had other flaws--I think the level design for III was rather better than for IV, and I didn't like the ability for heroes to die in IV--but I think the major flaw was the fact that it was 3D.

The are several issues. One is performance, and the other is how much you can see. Both are important.

And, of course, because rendering 3D in real-time takes a lot of processing power, the zippiness of Heroes III was lost--the game was slow again. Whether or not it was actually slower to play than Heroes III had been on my old machine I can't say--but again, the contrast with the older game on my new machine was stark. Heroes IV was tedious. I hadn't the patience.

Talking about Civilization IV, Greg writes:

Given that the map represents the whole globe, everything is going to be out of scale; my phalanx unit will be as tall as the mountains. Moreover, my phalanx unit will presumably be an individual Greek soldier, and will no longer feel like an iconographic representation of a phalanx; imagine combat between, say, a phalanx and a fighter jet. The Greek soldier thrusts his spear at the plane, the fighter's machineguns sputter. It's ridiculous.

A Liberal leaving the "left"

Keith Thompson has been a liberal since childhood, and had associated with the left since the 1960's. He wrote an article for the San Francisco Chronicle about leaving the left, who have lost their way. He writes:

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

Thanks to Michael J. Totten for pointing this out. Michael is a leftist intellectual who is right on the basics.

Ace's take on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Ace doesn't mince any words: "Star Wars Sucks". He writes:

Saw it late last night. I don't even think it merits a full review. I'll just make a few points:

1. You know that Christmas special, Santa Clause is Coming To Town, where they explain the origins of Santa and the various rituals associated with him? And then a chorus of off-screen children (to whom the story is being told) all say, "Ohhh! So that's why kids started writing letters to Santa!"

This whole trilogy was like that. Half the movies were just showing you how the original Star Wars trilogy myth began. "Ohhh, so that's how Anikin became Darth Vader!"

But none of this is necessary. Look, all that was just backstory in the first trilogy, and you don't need to show how the backstory happened. We all figured that Anikin was burned by fire or radiation or something, thus requiring his Vader armor/life support; does it really matter it turned out to be lava? I don't think so.

He also says:

8. Lucas, an aging boomer liberal, feels bad about the original trilogy being pro-war and militaristic and about good guys versus bad guys. So now, with more money than God, he attempts to do another swashbuckler, except his liberal pieties won't admit of actual "bad guys" anymore.

and also comments:

Sorry, Lucas. But if you're going to make a swashbuckling space fantasy war movie, you really can't make it an anti-war movie, along the lines of What If They Gave a War and No One Showed Up? except with rayguns and light-sabers.

The final Matrix movie did this too-- the liberal filmmakers wanted to make an anti-war statement, so they contrived an unsatisfying conclusion whereby the humans just negotiated with the machines that had been exterminating/imprisoning them for hundreds of years.

Dr. Z writes about the benefits of platform non-specific languages and implementations

Dr. Z. posted this morning his explanation of how the Z++ language and implementation provides an abstract language for implementing applications that will run on many different platforms. This doesn't mean, he says, that you can put a full-featured word processor on your cellphone, but you get the idea. He writes:

Paramount in expressiveness paradigm is the requirement of generality of its underlying abstract language. Different sets of linguistic features for each category is an indication of dependence upon hardware and is therefore contrary to abstractness. The idea behind abstraction is to learn certain techniques and to be able to apply them in similar situations. Variations in the language cause the learning of multiple unrelated techniques for most ordinary tasks. This in turn obstructs the natural process of building intuition in dealing with similar problems.

David Wallace-Wells writes about "Revenge of the Sith"

In Slate, David Wallace-Wells has reviews of "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" in his summary of the Blogosphere on last Friday. What he quotes is pretty scathing:

"The last half-hour was as thrilling a piece of filmmaking as I've seen," says freelance writer Ed Driscoll. "And it's all largely for naught, because … like the other two Star Wars prequels, the dialogue … is wooden and inert, the acting only more so, and only the lighting fast pacing manages to mask those sins—and then only slightly."

Our "unfunded" pension system (Social Security)

Social Security was never a normal pension system that was funded by assets. I'm afraid that it fits the definition of a Ponzi scheme. New members are putting in money to fund those who joined previously. Megan McArdle has a post about an article by Daniel Gross about pensions. She writes:

Daniel Gross's article on corporate pensions also contains this bit:

Because the national pension system—like many of its private-sector counterparts—is woefully underfunded, we are told, stakeholders must be willing to accept benefits that are lower than were promised and less than were anticipated.

But as Zimran Ahmed points out, this comparison is silly. Our pension system (Social Security, for those following along at home) isn't underfunded--it's unfunded. And there isn't any way to fund it, in the sense of storing up assets to cover the liabilities, unless we change the law so that the government can hold stocks or other assets. As P.J. O'Rourke has said, "the people of Eastern Europe had some very pungent names" for government ownership of economic assets.

I fixed a problem that I found was being caused by the Google desktop search!

Since a week ago, Thursday, my main machine has been plagued by this pop error message about "The procedure entry point SMapLS could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll". The one thing that I didn't do was to look at the popup message window label. I only did that today, and saw that it was the GoogleDesktopCrawl.exe that was the culprit. I uninstalled it for now, and the problem evaporated. I like the desktop search, but I don't want to mess with it right now. The problem seems to have occurred after rebooting from one of these spontaneous crashes that Windows claims is caused by a driver. This has happened to my HP Compaq Windows XP Professional machine at work, not just my cobbled together Windows XP Home Edition machine in my office at home. I had tried to ignore the popups, as everything seemed to work (I never did a Google desktop search, so I didn't notice anything else that was wrong).

The inflation calculator is pretty interesting, if disquieting

I had an idea that the IT job market in Dallas was depressed, but I had not really comes to grips with just how far it has fallen. I was using this inflation calculator to compare my present salary to what I was making in 1981, just out of the navy with an MS in Computer Science. I am making $49 per year more than I was making then. In other words, I'm making the same salary. I am hoping that others are doing better than I am, and that this reflects my being out of state from 2001 to 2004.

Yes, Revenge of the Sith has a goofball political message

I missed it, but George Lucas says that the Revenge of the Sith has a (what I consider a goofball) political message. He has obviously been smoking too much dope, as he says that he parallels between Iraq and Viet Nam are obvious. He also thinks we are headed down a path, like the Republic in the movie, to move over to a dictatorship, rather than a democracy. Fortunately, the message portrayed by the movie is so ineptly portrayed that most will miss it. There is such an orgy of blood and guts that only extreme leftists will see past that.

Seth Yantiss, at Say Anything, thinks that Revenge of the Sith is the best of the 6 Star Wars movies

I don't agree, but Seth Yantiss, of the Say Anything blog, writes that Revenge of the Sith is the best of the six Star Wars movies. He writes:

Episode 3 is easily the best of the 6 films. I now have to relegate “Return of the Jedi” to the runner up position.

If you haven’t seen it, Go! WOW! Seriously!

Office reviews of "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith"

I was interested to hear what my coworkers had to say about the movie we saw yesterday. The two numerical ratings were 7.5 and 8 out of 10. The other comments that I heard were that the dialog was "lame" and one guy said that there were too many fight scenes, and they became tiresome pretty quickly. The consensus was that the guy who played Anakin was a poor choice for the role. I suspect that a good bit of what we saw was the writing, not the acting, although I thought he struggled to deal with the role. My manager remarked that he hesitated to take his youngest son to see the movie, as he had grown to like the Anakin character. It is no wonder as in this movie, he became a psychopathic killer, and the transition from hero to villain was baffling to me. My manager suggested that it quickly became a lust for power, rather than the original goal to save Padme.

Dobeln, at Gene Expression, writes that Richard Florida's theory is "bunk"

It shouldn't surprise us, but Dobeln at Gene Expression, shows that Richard Florida's theory, if anything, has a negative correlation with economic results. Dobeln concludes:

So, what does Florida’s model really say? Essentially, he claims:

a) Being good at High-tech is good for growth.

b) Having a highly educated population is good for growth.

c) Having a people that’s non-conservative and into PC ideology is good for growth. This factor is measured in a “Euro-Tolerance index”.

Regarding the two first factors, I have but one thing to say: “Duh.”

Thus, the Tolerance index is what makes Florida’s theory interesting (and highly rewarding for Florida – 35 000 USD per lecture is pretty decent for an economics prof.). And this is where the graph above comes into play. It shows, essentially, that there is virtually no relationship whatsoever between economic performance and Florida’s ET-index. (To the extent there is, it’s negative) As the ET-index is the only original component of Florida’s theory, this is a pretty big deal.

Still, despite the fact that his entire theory appears to be bunk, we can learn a lot from Florida. I have even devised a get-rich-quick scheme based on his approach. It goes like this:

1.) Take established economic theory. 2.) Add PC 3.) Profit!

More thoughts about "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" (Caution, you may not want to read this if you haven't seen the movie)

The biggest mystery about the "Revenge of the Sith" is the leap that Anakin Starwalker made from Jedi and loving husband to psychotic killer and enemy of the Jedi. The original reason for his flip was plausible, although the dream sequences were poorly done. After Anakin decided to turn to the dark side to be have a chance of saving Padme, any talk of learning how to do so vanished, and he suddenly started killing everyone he could, including children. That is a gross generalization, but has some truth to it, as a first impression. Actually, he was only killing Jedi's. This is apparently George Lucas's plot summary.

"Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" review

I saw "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" early this afternoon. Up front, I have to say that it is totally unsuitable for small children, due to the graphic blood and guts spread all over. For anyone who is sensitive to the level of violence in entertainment, you need to be aware just how high that level is in this movie. Part of the reason is the extreme realism and masterful special effects that make the cities, droids, and vehicles look real. The fight scenes between humans and droids are amazing, when you consider that they are animated.

Should you see this movie? I would say that if you can handle the violence, the visuals make the movie worth the price. The story is pedestrian and predictable. You know what has to happen, and the latter part of the movie is weakly written and acted. The transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader really doesn't work, as the character development that we should expect to see is missing. Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Ewan McGregor, does as well as anyone. Natalie Portman, as Padmé does OK. She is at least good to look at, and we can be sympathetic to her. Someone remarked that George Lucas lost the ability to do dialog, and that seems to be the case in this movie. The action scenes are so good that we can almost forgive the poor writing and acting, where it exists. The acting is not uniformly bad, fortunately. I thought that Ian McDiarmid, as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, was as good as anyone in the film, despite being the evil power that is winning against the Jedi. The writing was so bad, that the supposed leftist political message was lost on me.

The Globe and Mail has a piece: "The Plot Thickens..."

There is a piece, today, in the online Globe and Mail, by by Bill Curry and Gloria Galloway called: "The plot thickens a critical vote looms". Apparently, the Canadians think that buying votes with sinecure appointments is perfectly fine, at least the way the Globe and Mail story portrays the practice. Ed Morrissey thought that it constituted bribery, buying votes. It must not be a big deal, because Paul Martin bought off the NDP by a big legislative payoff. One of two independents has been swayed to support the government (you wonder what he got from Paul Martin). The story starts like this, which shows you the Globe and Mail's spin on the situation:

"The fate of Canada's 38th Parliament hangs in the balance heading into what is sure to be a razor-thin confidence vote tonight that could launch a federal election after several wild weeks of dramatic political tactics and backroom deals."

I guess we are about to see how much stomach the Canadian public has for corrution and bribery

The latest development in the ongoing saga of Canadian politics is that now a Tory MP says that Paul Martin tried to bribe him and his wife, also a Tory MP. Ed Morrissey has the story. Many of us Americans with a Minnesota connection have interest in what is happening in Canada. My interest is also fueled by my relation to Nortel, having worked their twice in the past, and presently work with many Nortel veterans. Ed writes:

Another Conservative MP has gone public with allegations that the Liberal Party has attempted to bribe Tories with ministerial positions or Senate seats to buy votes on the upcoming confidence motion in tomorrow's session. Following the public outing by Inky Marks and the scandalous betrayal by Belinda Stronach, Gurmant Grewal came forward this evening to reveal that the Grits had offered a Senate seat for his wife and a Liberal sinecure to keep him from voting No on the budget.

Flavors of Conservative (and Liberal)

We knew that Glenn Reynolds socially liberal, while having conservative tendencies. Apparently, he calls himself a small-government strict constructionist. That is the sort of supreme court justice that he would to see nominated:

There's a lot of role-reversal going on: The New York Times has switched its position since the 1990s, along with some leading law professors, and Crooks & Liars has some amusing video (here and here), but this seems to me to be a purely political fight, and one I'm not terribly interested in. If I thought that Bush were likely to nominate actual small-government strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, perhaps I'd care more, but I've seen no sign that he's likely to do that.

Michael J. Totten has a long post about the political fracturing that exists (commenting on Pat Buchanan's take on conservatism's death):

But Buchanan is right about this. “Conservative” is as useless a label as “liberal.” Neither term describes anything unified. “Conservatives” are a coalition of competing, and often mutually hostile, groups of people with different ideas. So are “liberals.” Just because we have two dominant political parties doesn’t mean there are only two kinds of Americans or only two schools of political thought.

Marc Cooper and Hugh Hewitt agree on something

Both Marc Cooper and Hugh Hewitt are glad that Villaraigosa won the election for mayor of Los Angeles. It seems that Marc has mixed feelings:

Antonio Villaraigosa pummeled L.A.’s incumbent Mayor Jimmy Hahn out of office Tuesday night by what appears to be a rather spectacular 17 or 18 point margin.

But he also writes:

I voted for Tony and wish him well. And as I said before, I really wanted to squeeze sleazeball Hahn out of office. But having to suffer through the disillusioning, depressing, and disgusting excuse for a campaign we’ve just been through was a very high price to pay for watching Hahn get hosed away.

Hugh really doesn't have any reservations, although he disagrees with Villaraigosa on policy, across the board.

Here's what I sent the Los Angeles Times "Blogging The Mayor's Election" blog in mid-afternoon, and again at 7:30. It still isn't posted. Which tells you all you need to know about the Los Angeles Times' ability to be nimble and adaptive:

"The three reasons I am pleased Antonio will win:

Listeners to my radio show know I have been plugging Antonio since the primary, and plugged him during the primary along with Bernard Parks. I plugged Antonio four years ago as well. My conservative pals are shocked.

I almost posted his three reasons, but they are too long, so you should just go and read them.

Aggressive drivers in Dallas

I made many changes on the way home. I started off by having a mourning dove on my car, bracing against a stiff wind, and I almost thought that it wouldn't move, even when I started to roll. Turning off the alarm and shutting the passenger door didn't seem to phase it. When I went to get in, however, the dove took flight. Once headed south on the service road, I stayed to the right, even though I would normally immediately get into the leftmost lane that will continue. Lately, there had been construction barrels that extended into the left lane, so I started off on the right side. As I got south, I saw that I was being slowed by cars that were turning right. At that point, after going at least five miles, I got into my normal lane. As I headed south, I heard on the radio that the LBJ, headed east, was backed up to I35 on the west end. There either was or had been a problem in the perennial bottleneck at what is now called "the high five". My plan was to get on Spring Valley, and take that to the east of the bottleneck. After a slow start, all of a sudden, I was headed south toward the LBJ. I always hated battling my way across four lanes after entering the LBJ at Preston Road, so this seemed great. Typically, there are many aggressive drivers who don't want to let anyone enter the highway. Fortunately, if I back off enough, someone will motion me into the next lane over. This time, when I got onto the LBJ at Plano Road, the traffic was moving nicely. I could see the traffic bunching ahead, as the Northwest Highway exit is always troublesome. I could see a blcak KIA behind me, pressing. I touched the breaks several times, as the traffic was visibly slowing ahead of me. I tend to be cautious, as I have been caught a few times, moving at least 40mph when a short distance ahead, traffic suddenly stops. The only options are to stand on your breaks and pray, or head for the shoulder, if that is a possibility. In otherwords, I like to leave a good bit of room for safety. All of a sudden, as the road opened up, the black KIA shot around me and pulled in ahead of me. He (it was a man) immediately slowed, and then abruptly hit his breaks, enough to cause me to have to do so, as well. He then "gave me the finger" and took off towards the Northwest Highway exit. I guess I was fortunate to only get the finger and not be hit or shot. In the last week, at least two people were killed in road rage incidents when shots were fired. In one case, two cars were driving down the road with occupents exchanging gunfire. My wife had remarked just a day ago that it seemed like the most agressive drivers were in pickup trucks, but I think that you really can't tell when you will encounter one of these angry, aggressive people. All you can do is give way before them, as they are explosions waiting to happen. My wife called what I experinced "Road Rage". I was fortunate the man was only uncivil, not violent.

The Globe and Mail has the story about Belinda Stronach

The Globe and Mail has the photo showing Belinda Stronach shaking hands with Paul Martin, as she joins his government. They have the story written by Allison Dunfield (they call it "explosive", which is probably not an overstatement):

"In an explosive development leading up to Thursday's dramatic budget vote, Conservative MP Belinda Stronach has crossed the floor to join the Liberal Party as the new Human Resources Development Minister."

Her commitment to the Tories was apparently not great. I consider that the job for which she sold out the Conservative Party is a "fluff" job. It is the sort of job you would have in Howard Dean's or Dennis Kucinich's administration. It is the sort of politically correct drival that only a leftist would love (sorry for the harsh words, but that is how it seems).

Paul Martin is determined to stay in power (no matter what it takes)

Ed Morrissey thinks that Paul Martin may have stabilized his situation by flipping a Conservative MP. He gave Belinda Stronach a cabinet position, and changed her to his side. That has been Paul Martin's pattern. He is buying his way to staying in power. Ed writes:

Ironically, Stronach is a newcomer to politics who first launched her career by attempting to wrest control of the Conservative Party from Stephen Harper after leaving her CEO position at Magna International. After that strange move failed last year, she settled into her position as a backbencher from Ontario, one of the few Tory MPs from that province. She had spoken publicly about her reservations on using the budget for a no-confidence vote, but had sided with the Tories on the previous votes they attempted to use to bring down Martin and the Liberals. The only item that has appeared to change in the hours since the last such vote is her new Cabinet position in charge of human resources and skills development.

Our buddies, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes

The Peabody Awards just fell in stature, if they had any. They gave our friends Dan Rather and Mary Mapes awards for their coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Ed Morrissey certainly doesn't think much of it.

The Peabody Awards luncheon yesterday provided a stage for the reunion of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, who were honored for their journalistic prowess in revealing the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that had already been addressed by the Pentagon before CBS ever found out about it -- and both of whom later disgraced themselves in one of the worst breaches of journalistic ethics ever revealed in broadcast history. In comments that reflected the cluelessness of the Peabody voters, Mary Mapes continued to insist that the story she presented on CBS' 60 Minutes II was factually true and that CBS covered it up for "corporate" reasons.

Dr. Z has some harsh words for SOAP and the like

It seems that Dr. Z has some strong feelings and ideas about things like XML, whether it is text or binary. I agree that XML is only human-readable in the sense that it is not binary. Large XML documents are still not easily understandable by humans. The whole webservice business, based on XML, has proved to be problemmatic, in the sense that transmitting large slabs of XML is costly, with respect to both bandwidth and processing times. I will only give you pieces of what Dr. Z wrote. I strongly suggest that you read what he has to say, of which I have included several pieces:

One interpretation of money is products and services. Now that the XML appeal is diminishing again, why not throw in a previously failed attempt, binary XML. How fortunate for us to live in a society that condemns monopoly. Otherwise, our choices would be limited to the dictator’s list.

He also wrote:

Then, they paid some with appropriate academic degrees to fill the pages of journals. Even a note to the editor signed by several authors with Ph.D. is quite authoritative. I can understand benign notes for earning our living, for I am a human, too. What I do not understand is a scientist working on SOAP purely for research purposes! I hope you realize I am not speaking of some kind of detergent.

More about Pajamas Media (making money from blogs, we hope)

Thanks to Ace for the link to the Pajamas Media interview. John Hawkins has an interview with Marc Danziger, one of the three founders of Pajamas Media, along with Charles Johnson, and Roger L. Simon. Pajamas Media doesn't take a political position. The editorial board, for example, ranges from the leftist-intellectual Marc Cooper (a Nation editor) to Larry Kudlow (conservative economist).

John Hawkins: You, Charles Johnson, and Roger L. Simon run Pajamas Media, correct? How did you decide to get this started and was what you're doing now the original concept?

Marc Danziger: Yes - we're the general partners; there are some other folks who have interests we've swapped for help in various ways, but it's the three of us. Charles and Roger had been thinking about how to take the attention the blogs had been getting and make a business of it and I've been working on "long tail" business models for a long time. They called to bounce some ideas off of me, I bounced them back in ways they liked, and we decided to rent a barn and put on a show.

John Hawkins: So, what you're doing now is the original concept you had?

Marc Danziger: Very close. (It has) three legs: 1) (An) ad network serving mainstream Internet advertisers; 2) Feed serving blog content to mainstream media; 3) Feed serving blog content and ways of finding blog content to the general public.

Here's a way to think about it: the power of the blogosphere is inherently dynamic and chaotic by nature. It ebbs, surges, and moves in ways that can't be predicted or controlled, and if you tried, you'd kill what's interesting about it. But, as more and more attention gets paid to it, there is value there - in the attention (ads) and in the content. So how do you capture that value? How do you make it possible for bloggers to be like Ani DiFranco? So they can be the masters and mistresses of their own fate and not wait for The Washington Monthly, Newsweek, or The New Republic to hire them as columnists? So we want to build a set of interfaces between the traditional media world and blogs: blog energy, creativity, and ideas on one side, and mainstream media attention and dollars on the other.

Ace also warns us about George Lucas's movie

Ace also writes:

"Lucas is increasingly comfortable in his liberalism (having more money than all the Hutts in Huttspace will do that), and increasingly desperate to atone for the supposed proto-Reaganite cryptomilitarism that animated his original trilogy. ("Animated" is the right word, because that's what made the movies fresh and gave them life.) As in his previous two entries, he obliquely comments on modern-day politics, and I don't think many of you are going to like his newest [stuff]."

I would also say that the first two movies, in particular, had some of the freshness and flavor of the "proto-Libertarianism" from Robert A. Heinlein's first novels (prior to Stranger in a Strange Land). The third movie started to go wrong, and I didn't bother to see any of the movies after that.

My first instinct to pass on this movie was probably right

When first asked, I declined to go see the last Star Wars movie, but when I heard it was a sanctioned business outing that took the place of work, I reconsidered. After reading what Ace wrote, I think that I was right the first time:

Yeahp, the line that (I think) appears in every single Star Wars film captures my feelings about the upcoming final prequel. I had allowed myself to gain a New Hope about the possibility of the series' redemption, but now I fear it will be another attack of the clones.

Someone at NRO (forget who) said the movie was bad, bad, bad, and that critics had simply become so pussified that they couldn't bear to be on the wrong side of mass opinion (or Hollywood power) and thus claimed the film to be far better than it is.

Life is too short too spend listening to some leftist political statement in the guise of a art.

A post about the new Pew Research Poll on Gene Expression

"Arcane" at Gene Expression has a long listing of results from the latest Pew Research Poll. I happen to be generally critical of Pew, as they seem more bent on affecting public opinion rather than measuring it. Arcane cludes by writing:

So, this is very interesting and surprising data. I strongly recommend that everyone should read the report or look at the stances of the voting blocks on the various issues. There's a lot more interesting stuff in the report than just the stuff I posted here, although it was weak on many areas, such as on issues concerning immigration. I also highly recommend looking at the principle findings.

Also, take their typology test and see where you stand... I'm an Enterpriser, in case anyone cares. :)

Michael Isikoff's piece sparked the rioting in Afghanistan

It turns out that a piece by Michael Isikoff, in the Periscope section of Newsweek is what sparked rioting in Afghanistan. Powerline has the story:

At NEWSWEEK, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur'an down a toilet. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but news-week National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK periscope item to a senior Defense official, asking, "Is this accurate or not?" The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the periscope draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report.

So Isikoff relied on a telephone call with an anonymous government official paraphrasing a forthcoming report, confirmed by placing a draft of the Periscope item before another anonymous government official. Isikoff never saw the underlying report or even had it read to him.

Michael Isikoff was so anxious to damage the Bush administration that he wrecked havoc in Afghanistan.

One of my systems with Windows XP Home Edition has a bothersome problem (UPDATE)

Friday morning, I found that my primary computer had spontaneously rebooted and started giving an error message that seemed like it could be severe. I am running Windows XP Home Edition SP2 on both my main machines at home. The one with the problem has been pieced together from the remains of a machine from early 1999. The error message that I got after the last spontaneous reboot was "The procedure entry point SMapLS could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll". I had looked at several options, but with my current level of expertise with Windows (pretty low), I chose the "PC MightyMax" utility. I had looked at Easy Desk Software's System Sentry, but it seemed like it was not what I needed. I had used the Windows ME version to stabilize this machine when I had moved from Windows 98 SE (I think) to ME. Windows ME had the issue that Windows Updates would never install cleanly if you were running something like Zone Alarm, which is what I was using at the time. I eventually switched back to McAfee Personal Firewall Plus, which is what I currently use. I hope that MightyMax works, rather than wrecking havoc. I will report how it goes. UPDATE--I believe that PC MightyMax probably cleaned up my PC so that is it more stable, but it does not fix DLL problems. I had thought that EasyDesk System Sentry did that sort of thing, but it didn't look like it, when I brought it up. I've asked Easy Desk for support, as I get an error message on starting up System Sentinel (it can't find Find.bin).

The people spoke

I heard a discussion on the local NPR station about the latest local elections. The person being interviewed was a professor from the University of Texas at Arlington. He said that the lesson from these last elections is that if the people think elected officials are not listening to them, they will vote them out of office, in hopes of finding someone who will listen. In Dallas, the "Strong Mayor" proposal was defeated, because people in South Dallas and Oak Cliff thought that they might lose some of their clout, if the mayor's hand was strengthend. Dallas is rife with racial politics, and even though Mayor Laura Miller is a lefty Democrat, she lost this battle. Now, Black pastors from South Dallas want her recalled. Before she went on the city council, Laura Miller wrote for the alternative newspaper The Dallas Observer. Laura Miller is most closely associated with Oak Lawn, the GLBT, and so-called arts communities.

Amit Varma (India Uncut) on Blogs

Amit Varma, from India Uncut, writes about what he said on CNBC:

Two, why are blogs different?

My answer: Blogs, to begin with, have relatively low costs. Secondly, the attention of the reader of an OOP, or even an MSM publication, is diffused: he has lots to read, and may not be looking for anything specific. The reader of a blog, on the other hand, has come there to read one particular writer (or group of writers).

Also, all bloggers blog for love. Anyone who does it for money learns within a week of using Google Adsense that there's no money to be made right now. (Some bloggers do make good money now, but they didn't begin that way.) Because they do it for that reason alone, the intensity of their commitment shows through to the reader. Heck, I'm a professional journalist, all around me I see jaded journos for whom that next article is just part of their job, a chore to be done. Bloggers bring more passion and more life into their work.

Many outstanding journalists like to blog because, as Andrew Sullivan put it (via Peter), it allows them to "seize the means of production". (I know I'm repeating myself. Sorry.) No editors or publishers to deal with. All these factors raises the integrity of many blogs, and readers sense and respect that, and write about it on their blogs. The best bloggers, thus, build their brand virally. And their costs are low.

Three, so how will blogs make money?

My answer: there are two things neccessary for blogs to make money (in the Indian context, at least). One, readership will have to reach much higher. In India, certainly, the readership of the top blogs is far too little to have an impact on either MSM or the world in general. Two, micropayments need to become ubiquitous. Would I pay, say, Rs 40 (US$1) a month to read my favourite blogger? You bet I would. Would I pay five times that much to read a basket of five of my favourite bloggers? Yes. Maybe I'm an aberration; or maybe I'm not. I don't believe that people mind paying for quality content on the web. (It was once believed that no one would pay for music online, in the Napster days, but look what iTunes has achieved.) But it is irritating to go through that process of filling in credit card numbers and all the rest of it. Once micropayments become ubiquitous, and paying such amounts securely takes one mouseclick, I believe subscriptions will become a viable business model. But that is years away.

And, of course, there's also this.

Update: Yes, OOPs is an original acronym.

Geek Alert: Finally, a comparison of IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse IDEs

Todd Huss has a comparison of Eclipse and the IntelliJ IDEA IDE's for Java. The short summary is that they both have similar functionality, but that "out of the box", IDEA has some nicer features. He summarizes:

To summarize my initial findings I don't think you can go wrong using either IDE, they're both extremely powerful. On the Eclipse front I would definitely recommend going the MyEclipse route, for $30 a year per person you'll save money over the time you'd spend keeping a plethora of plugins up-to-date. Overall I think Idea is an ever so slightly more polished IDE than Eclipse. Is it worth $500 per person? Too early for me to say. It took me about 5 hours of using it before I started to get over that initial feeling of "this is worse but only because I'm not used to it yet" to evolve to "I can do everything I did in Eclipse and there are some things that I like better".

Marc Cooper doesn't want to abandon the Iraqi's to the car bombers

Marc Cooper didn't like the Iraq war and how the Bush administration is running the battle against the insurgents, but he doesn't want to leave the Iraqi's to the mercy of the car bombers. He writes (we don't quite have all the context, but he is refuting the cut and run anti-war types):

The first assertion, about an indeterminate stay of the American troops is nevertheless and -- unfortunately -- quite plausible. And more than plausible, perhaps inevitable, especially if the anti-war left can do no better than propose immediate withdrawal. I find it extremely difficult to imagine that being a persuasive counter (at least for those who give a rat’s ass about the Iraqi people themselves) to the status quo.

Indeed, it’s a moral forfeit that cedes undue and dangerous credence to the Bush admin’s disastrous stay-the-course strategy.

We need a third position that moves toward an end of the U.S. occupation but does not, in the process, abandon the Iraqi people to car-bomber fascists.

It will be of little consequence to those blown apart by suicide-bound fanatics to stand over their corpses and say: “It’s all Bush’s fault. There was nothing we could do.”

Dr. Z on component-oriented software development

I heard a lot of "buzz" about component-oriented software, possibly as early as the late 1990's. I noticed that Dr. Z has a post explaining the subject. He starts by writing:

What do we mean by component-oriented (application) development (COD)? What linguistic ingredients are necessary to realize COD?

Generally, COD connotes the capability of shelving (fully) compiled program modules that can be used directly in composing larger programs. The criterion is the ability to pick a component off the shelf and use it without any form of processing.

Razib, at Gene Expression, comments on "Kingdom of Heaven"

Razib, at Gene Expression, is not as negative about Ridley Scott's new movie "Kingdom of Heaven" as Michael Totten. Part of what Razib wrote was:

I think this interview about the film The Kingdom of Heaven is worth the read. I watched the movie, it was acceptable at the matinee price (though the length was a bit much), though the battle scenes weren't as good as what you got at the beginning of Gladiator (Ridley Scott, same schtick). You saw a lot less of Eva Green than in The Dreamers (the link not work safe!).

A test of "moral intuitions"

I just took a test. Ann Althouse linked to this test of moral intuitions, and I tried it, as I often do with such things. These were my results:

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.53.

Your Interference Factor is: 0.20.

Your Universalising Factor is: 0.60.

This confirms what I suspected...

Michael J. Totten warns us off "Kingdom of Heaven". He links to a piece that nails the movie for what it is. Michael says:

So I saw Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. How could I not watch Kingdom of Heaven? I love almost all of Ridley Scott’s movies. (Hannibal is the big whopping exception.) Blade Runner ties with Kenneth Branaugh’s Henry V as my favorite movie of all time. And I can still watch Gladiator no matter what kind of movie I’m in the mood for. I’m a sucker for the big epics.

But Kingdom of Heaven? I won’t watch that one again.

He links to this piece by "Doctor Frank":

Have you seen this movie, Kingdom of Heaven? I'll admit, it's no Troy, but it's still a hoot.

Kingdom of Heaven asks a question that has plagued historians for decades: what would happen if a late 20th-century, secular, agnostic, multiculturalist, progressive, sensitive Hollywood type were to be transported back in time to participate in one of history's grandest spectacles? Could one of the most embarrassingly culturally insensitive chapters of our history be rewritten or perhaps even avoided altogether, through the efforts of one determined, sensitive man who is as open-minded about stuff as we are?

It's a neat idea, and it is arguably needed now more than ever. So Ridley Scott, himself a knight like Walter Scott before him, sets the Wayback for the late 12th Century, and sends a former elf named Legolas back to medieval Jerusalem, just to see if he can single-handedly make the Crusades more palatable to modern sensibilities by forging a caring, mutually-fulfilling Christian-Saracen support network in the Crusader Kingdom.

Legolas has a degree of success, at first. Jerusalem folks, it is agreed, should stick together; Jerusalem folks should all be pals. Mohammedans dance with the infidels' daughters; Crusaders dance with the Saracens' gals. You're OK! No, man, you're OK! You and me are free to be you and me. These kids are all right.

I already had made plans to not see this movie, and I am now even more determined not to see it.

The budget vote on May 19 will decide the Liberal government's fate

Paul Martin has agreed to a budget vote on May 19 that will determine of the government continues or falls. The Globe and Mail has the story, written by Terry Weber and Allison Dunfield. They started off by writing:

Prime Minister Paul Martin has called for a vote on the budget for next Thursday, a move that could topple his fragile minority government.

"I am proposing that there will be a vote that day on the budget bill and that vote will be a vote of confidence," Mr. Martin told reporters in Ottawa Wednesday after an emergency cabinet meeting.

That announcement will keep the government in power for another week.

Robert Kimball, form the New Criterion, has a piece on "Retaking the Universities"

After the collapse, partly through success, of the Viet Nam Anti-War movement, the people involved moved into academia and gradually took control. Robert Kimball, of The New Criterion, has a piece published on the Opinion Journal website. It is called "Retaking the Universities: a Battle Plan". Part of what he has to say, and quote, is:

Nevertheless, as one looks around at academic life these days, it is easy to conclude that corruption yields not only decay but also opportunities. Think of the public convulsion that surrounded the episode of Ward Churchill's invitation to speak at Hamilton College earlier this year. The spectacle of a highly paid academic with a fabricated background comparing the victims of 9/11 to a Nazi bureaucrat was too much. Mr. Churchill's fellow academics endeavored--they are still endeavoring--to rally round. But the public wasn't buying it. Such episodes, as Victor Davis Hanson noted in National Review recently, were like "a torn scab revealing a festering sore beneath":

Ward Churchill's plight gives us a glimpse into the strange world of the contemporary postmodern university of tenured ideologues, where professed identity politics, ethnic or gender chauvinism, and a disbelief in empiricism allow a con man to bully his way to guaranteed lifetime employment, and a handsome salary, and the right to say anything at all, no matter how inflammatory.

The New Donkey says: The DLC is still alive and kicking

The New Donkey is a DLC guy, and he responds to a post on the New Republic site lamenting the demise of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Over at &c, the New Republic's blog, Reihan Salam, who's sitting in for Noam Scheiber, did a post today that I obviously can't leave alone. Under the title, "Where Have You Gone, New Democrats?", Salam cites one of those perennial Nation obituaries for the DLC (they've been publishing them for twenty years), and then mourns at our grave since it would be nice if somebody in the Democratic camp had a strategy for dealing with the plight of low-income workers that's a little broader and a lot more effective than pushing for "living wage" ordinances or demonizing Wal-Mart.

The timing of this lament was interesting, insofar as my colleague The Moose, in his DLC-sponsored blog, made a similar case against Wal-Mart-o-phobia yesterday morning. And less than a month ago, our think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute published a well-regarded tax reform proposal by Paul Weinstein that included a super-charged version of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the longstanding New Democrat alternative to exclusive reliance on minimum wages as a strategy for supporting low-income working families.

Our Buddies, the Liberals (in Canada)

The Prime Minister, Paul Martin, and his Liberal party have been governing with a minority of the parliament for some time. Yesterday, with a less than clearcut vote of no-confidence, the Liberals have been stonewalling, and refuse to leave. Ed Morrissey has a good post about their situation. To govern, they may be forced to have a vote to show confidence in the Liberal government. They may well lose such a vote, but may need to have the vote to have a chance of continuing in power.

Now that the Liberals have defied a no-confidence motion passed by Parliament, their next step may well be tabling their own motion of confidence soon to try to assure the public that the Liberals still have a right to govern. John Ward of the Canadian Press explains that without some sort of explicit act that shows yesterday's no-confidence vote as a fluke or a trick, the nation will reject the Liberal explanation for why they have not yet left office:

Opposition procedural manoeuvres may not topple the minority Liberals, but experts are predicting the government will likely have to bring forward its own confidence motion soon.

Without a demonstration that it actually does have the confidence of the Commons, the government could find itself unable to govern.

Those in the Great White North may not be all that happy with those of us who live South of the border being so interested in their political situation. My interest is partly sparked by my relish for former PM Jean Chr&etien getting his just desserts. I didn't appreciate his arrogant disdain for the US during the latter years of his government, so I have little sympathy for him. Paul Martin seems more of a pathetic figure, so even though he apparently had a hand in the Sponsorship scandal, I wouldn't have any pleasure from his discomfort.

The Liberals lost a vote, covered by the Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail has an article by Terry Weber about the Liberal loss, today. The Liberals are stonewalling, and refuse to step down. The Bloc Quebecois and the Tories joined forces in the vote. z

Opposition MPs managed to force a motion through the House of Commons Tuesday demanding the fragile Liberal minority government step down.

The Liberals, however, say they don't consider the move a true no-confidence motion and won't resign.

But the success of the effort deals another blow to a government desperately trying to stave off an election until the dust settles around the federal sponsorship scandal

Paul Graham says: "Hiring is obsolete"

I read what Paul Graham has to say, partly because I find what he writes to often be interesting to me, and because I share some common interests with him. He has a new article, based on what he gave in a talk at Berkeley, recently. It is called "Hiring is Obsolete". Part of what he writes says:

A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. I think there are a lot of undergrads whose brains are in a similar position: they're only a few steps away from being able to start successful startups, if they wanted to, but they don't realize it. They have more than enough technical skill. They just haven't realized yet that the way to create wealth is to make what users want, and that employers are just proxies for users in which risk is pooled.

If you're young and smart, you don't need either of those. You don't need someone else to tell you what users want, because you can figure it out yourself. And you don't want to pool risk, because the younger you are, the more risk you should take.

Envelopes full of money?

Even Jean Chrétien's Liberals should have known that taking envelopes packed with cash might just possibly be problemmatic. The Globe and Mail has an article by their usual reporter (Tu Thanh Ha) following the Gomery investigation of the Sponsorship Scandal.

Benoît Corbeil, the party's onetime director-general in Quebec, said yesterday that the money -- doled out in envelopes containing $100 bills -- came from a secret $50,000 donation from Jean Brault, an advertising executive who has admitted kicking back sponsorship cash to the Liberal Party.

Dr Z is blogging about language design on his two blogs

I am privileged to work with Dr Z at the present time. While I am not working directly with him, I share a common area with him, so that there are opportunities to discuss interesting technical issues. I have been reading, with interest, his insights as to language design and with respect to more specific design issues, such as "Exception Mechanism Correctness" (There are three earlier posts on the subject). He has studied in depth some subjects that I had not needed to address. When you consider that he has designed his own language (Z++) and implemented the compiler and VM, then it is understandable that he has covered a great deal of ground, in depth. He also has written recently about levels of abstraction, and that we may want to use different languages for different uses, as we need a particular sort of expressiveness. Perhaps we could write everything in C or C++, but by doing so, we would pass up the advantages of other languages that might better be used for solving a particular problem. He has written a post at C++ Wish list called "Expressiveness and Minimalism".

Someone from SiteMeter contacted me about Graphic Artist 2

I was pleased when a received an email from someone with SiteMeter, pointing out the problem with the script in Graphic-Artist-2.com. I had assumed that I was not getting any traffic but pictures, but when I found from IndexTools that I was getting traffic, there seemed to be a problem. SiteMeter got back to me before I asked them for help (a very good thing). Sitemeter is the site traffic meter of choice for the Blogosphere. IndexTools costs money, on a recurring basis, so it is not for everyone. I only know about IndexTools because the company I work for uses IndexTools to monitor their website traffic and downloads.

This seems rather strange to see: "No Renegade Group Behind Linux"

There is a strange article in Business Week titled "No Renegade Group Behind Linux". It is essentially saying that there wasn't an army of programmers up in their rooms, while their parents watched TV, coding Linux. Then again, the author practically says that, after stating it wasn't true. The author, Stuart Cohen concludes:

So forget the counterculture myth of the renegade Linux programmer. Sure, it represents a new way to create software, but the actual process looks a lot like how enterprise software has been made for decades. Linux creator Torvalds has also turned to a much more experienced community of developers to help him, many of whom already work for the world's largest IT companies.

Take Torvalds' key lieutenant overseeing the Linux kernel, Andrew Morton. He's no amateur hacker. Morton worked for 10 years as a development manager at Nortel Networks (NT ) building carrier-grade global telecommunications software. Carrier-grade systems must meet service availability requirements in the range of five 9's -- 99.999% uptime. So he knows all about business hardening of enterprise software.

Make no mistake, Linux is in professional hands.

"Google gets it"

Michael Heraghty, at Media Junk, says that Google understands the Internet, ("Google gets it") while those went under after the Dot Com bust didn't. He concludes:

Of course, it may not seem good business sense to offer innovations for free – but these are new technologies, that involve changing user behaviours. And new user behaviours inevitably open up new business opportunities. Google’s Adwords wouldn’t be possible, for example, if Google’s search engine hadn’t been so useful, and become so popular. Adwords wasn’t something the founders envisaged when they started the company; now it is Google’s main source of revenue.

The revolution is happening. Google gets it. I try to

I now have an example where SiteMeter is not counting visits and page views

For the site Graphic-Artist-2.com, SiteMeter has not recorded any visitor sessions or page views in quite some time. I now use IndexTools, as well, and I found out that in the last 9 days, there have been as many as 3 visitors to the site. The main purpose of Graphic Artist 2 is to feed images to other sites, but I have content on the site, as well, and will be adding more. I had heard rumblings about SiteMeter, and now can add some data to the discussion.

Marc Cooper tells his lefty buddies why we just can't pull out of Iraq instantly

Marc Cooper opposed the war in Iraq and doesn't like how we have been prosecuting the war, but understands why we just can't pull out instantly and leave the Iraqi's to the tender mercies of the Ba'athists. Marc has a good post on the subject. Marc starts off by writing:

There’s a new trend developing among what’s loosely called the American peace-movement: attack those closest to you and blame them for the failure of the anti-war cause to get much traction. The problem is, we’re told, not enough people on the left will simply take a "Troops Out Now" position. And that reticence, we’re told, is balling up the movement.

I think exactly the opposite. The anti-war movement in this country has sputtered precisely because its leadership has insisted from the onset that everyone accept the formula of immediate withdrawl of all American troops from Iraq.

Americans, fortunately, ain’t that naïve. Unlike the more zealous ideologues who shout at them through bullhorns, they understand that one can have opposed the war intially, still oppose its conduct but NOT support immediate withdrawal. Not support it for a simple, rather self-evident reality; as awful as things are in Iraq, they would probably get even more barbarous and bloody in the vacuum of an American withdrawal. Sad, unfortunate, vexing, contradictory but nevertheless, true.

Marc Cooper reviews The Nation's offerings on left-wing talk radio

Marc Cooper has a good piece that reviews the fare in The Nation on left-wing (liberal?) talk radio: "A Hit. and a Miss." Marc starts off by writing:

On The Nation magazine’s new website you can find a loosely knit compendium of just-published pieces on “progressive radio.” I had no hand in this venture, happy to say, as I find too many of the pieces to be acritical cheerleading instead of serious analysis.

The one outstanding piece in the package, however, comes from crusty and cantankerous Nicholas von Hoffman who reviews the liberal Air America network and then proceeds to ask some pretty tough questions: like does anyone over there know what they are doing? And does anything they do have any political significance?

Marc has a "salacious excerpt from Nick’s story". Marc finishes by writing:

Such pieces suggest that they see light of day not because they have met professional reporting standards, but only because they fulfill some or another quota of political pandering. Quoting Bill Clinton (or was it Dr. Dean?) " We can do better than that." Can't we?

The Ratner puffer piece on Goodman also inadvertently highlights another thorny issue. If alternative media, like The Nation—with infinitely fewer resources want to effectively take on and challenge the more powerful MSM—then don't we need to employ stricter and higher standards of credibility, not lower or looser ones? Read the Ratner piece and you decide who's off the track here.

The charge is the "Kingdom of Heaven" is Osama Bin Laden's version of history

I have heard generally bad reviews of Ridley Scott's new movie, Kingdom of Heaven. The worst take on the movie is that it replaces history with Osama Bin Laden's view (from Variety):

But the film has also been dogged in recent months by accusations that it short-shrifts real history. Jonathon Riley-Smith, one of Britain's leading authorities on the Crusades, labeled it "Osama Bin Laden's version of history" and said, "It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists." Islamic professor Khaled Abu Fadl of the U. of California accused the film of "teaching people to hate Muslims."

The "Smart copy" feature of the Firefox browser

Part of the time, the smart copy feature of Firefox works, and most of the time it does not for me. The other problemmatic component is Blogger, of course, but all the evidence seems to point to Firefox. I just copied the image location to paste into the Blogger editor in Firefox, and when I tried to CTRL-V, that failed. When I went to the Edit menu, paste was greyed out. I opened Notepad, and pasted into that. I then copied and tried to paste again. The first time, CTRL-V didn't work, but when I copied again, even though the paste menu item was greyed out, CTRL-V worked. I wish there was some alternative, but IE6 has so many faults that I would rather not even launch it, must less use it.

Victor Davis Hanson on the Democrats' situation

The eminent Victor David Hanson has a good analysis of the Democratic Party situation. As always, he has a long, thoughtful piece. I had first learned about him by listening to Hugh Hewitt, when I was working in Minneapolis, up until a year ago. He starts off:

We are in unsure times amid a controversial war. Yet the American people are not swayed by the universities, the major networks, the New York Times, Hollywood, the major foundations, and NPR. All these bastions of doctrinaire liberal thinking have done their best to convince America that George W. Bush, captive to right-wing nuts and Christian fanatics, is leading the country into an abyss. In fact, a close look at a map of red/blue counties nationwide suggests that the Democrats are in deepening trouble.

Why? In a word, Democratic ideology and rhetoric have not evolved from the 1960s, although the vast majority of Americans has — and an astute Republican leadership knows it.

Michelle Malkin has a post about Liberal analysis of the Ohio vote in 2004

The more rational liberals have taken time to analyze the Ohio vote in 2004, and found no evidence of fraud, unlike the leftist conspiracy theorists. Michelle Malkin has a good post and a quote about what they found. She concludes:

And believe it or not, over at DailyKos, a remarkable outbreak of rationality can be seen here, where a poster reports on some heavy-duty statistical analysis of exit polls by Kos contributor Elizabeth Liddle, who debunks academic conspiracists who believe the official vote count was corrupted. Very interesting stuff that you won't read about in the MSM---mostly because we are so mathematically challenged. If you are a super-geek (I'm married to someone who used to perform regression analyses for a living), you will appreciate Liddle's meticulous work and insights. See Mickey Kaus for the layman's interpretation and Mystery Pollster for extended statistical explanations (with graphs! and Monte Carlo simulations!).

The Great Marc Cooper is taking The Nation into the future with podcasting

Marc Cooper is promoting the use of canned audio from his radio show and podcasting at The Nation. The Nation doesn't represent what I believe, but I like Marc Cooper. He won't give you someone's talking points. He is not a leftist activist, but is a leftist intellectual. I am often caught by surprise and find myself agreeing with what he has to say (I also often find him at the opposite end of the spectrum from what I believe or think).

The New Donkey on the British election

Our friend at the New Donkey has a post about the British election. He writes:

With the British elections just a few hours away now, the final polls indicate that Tony Blair and Labour are headed for a third term, as late deciders break towards Labour and the Liberal Democrats. A Populus poll for the Times of London has the Tories dropping to 27 percent, with Labour at 37 percent and the Lib Dems at 21 percent. In other words, the Tories are again showing that they are not an effective opposition party, even with marginally better leadership than they had in the last two elections.

The New Donkey is involved with the Democratic Leadership Council, which is the saner arm of the Democratic Party. He would apparently like to see Tony Blair re-elected, as would I.

How the Middle East went the wrong way

Wretchard, at The Belmont Club, writes about how the Middle East adopted the wrong models. He quotes from Bernard Lewis's Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East:

Political Islam first became a major international factor with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 ... what happened in Iran was a genuine revolution, a major change with a very significant ideological challenge, a shift in the basis of society that had an immense impact on the whole Islamic world, intellectually, morally, and politically. The process that began in Iran in 1979 was a revolution in the same sense as the French and the Russian revolutions were. Like its predecessors, the Iranian Revolution has gone through various stages of inner and outer conflict and change and now seems to be entering the Napoleonic or, perhaps more accurately, the Stalinist phase.

Wretchard concludes:

In Bernard Lewis' view immense and destructive forces crept unnoticed onto modern world stage until they manifested themselves on September 11 upon a nearly blind America. It was a witches' brew, compounded of the worst aspects of Nazism and Communism, which in turn fueled a reaction by political Islam, overlaid by the limitless ambitions of the Sunni Wahabists. Somewhere in all of this, Lewis calls out, like a father seeking a lost child, for the libertarian Islam: the Islam of justice and equality of centuries gone by. Whether he will find it is open to debate; and sadly observes that in the West, both freedom and the memory of its existence in the Islamic world are still being edited away.

I got this essay straight from Dr. Z, yesterday

Dr. Z stood at the whiteboard, both teaching and thinking through his ideas about programming languages. I was the sounding board for what he was doing. He has changed the title of his second blog to Abstract Software Development Language. I noticed this morning that he had started to write about what we had discussed. One key point he made was:

Language is consequential. Therefore, we begin by considering the categories of problem domains. The current universe of programming can be divided into four main categories. These categories are technology, device, system and application.

He also says, among other things:

The space of application is of particular interest to us. This space consists of software that are designed and developed in isolation. That is, when developing an application one does not write program because nothing is being programmed. Instead, one solves the problems in this domain by crafting software.

I recommend that if you are interested in software development, that you read the rest of what Dr. Z has written so far. I await the rest of his essay with great interest.

Johanna Rothman's other blog is about project management

Johanna Rothman's other blog is about project management. Her latest post is about schedules and managing projects. She says:

Schedule Game #10: We'll Know Where We Are When We Get There

One of my clients claimed he had ADHD. He had trouble keeping projects focused on one goal. I've known him for a while, and he didn't have this problem when he was a project manager. Nope, he made sure that each project he managed had a goal, and beware any senior manager who wanted to change that goal. But when he moved into senior management, he had trouble allowing the projects to finish, focused on one goal.

Johanna Rothman on Parnas's Law

Johanna Rothman has a good post about hiring technical people. That is also the title of one of her blogs. The essence of what she is saying in this case is (thanks to Ron for pointing this out):

Parnas's Law of Hiring

My colleague, Will, has been attempting to hire developers. He's a bit frustrated. Take a look at Explaining the tech job market. Will is frustrated with the level of competence he's seeing in candidates. That prompted him to discover Parnas's Law of Hiring:

Parnas's Law: The more incompetent developers you hire, the more you need.