bascule

Well that's that, the bailout has been signed into law: http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/news/economy/house_friday_bailout/index.htm I'm going to wait for some analysis before I decide if I'm happy.

You aren't talking about when they were discussing climate change and gay marriage, are you? That was the most absurdly one-sided part of the debate I saw.

She was changing the subject a lot and talking about something totally irrelevant That said, I'm not sure she was the greatest debate moderator. I thought there were quite a few times Palin was noticibly dodging the question when she didn't step in and try to steer her back on subject. Biden seemed to talk right over her...

Not having seen the movie, I'm still going to go ahead and guess that Religulous doesn't invoke Godwin's Law, whereas Stein's movie did.

Well, my take is Biden owned Palin pretty frequently. Palin had a hilarious soundbyte in there about how the pundits will scrutinize the debate for disagreements and point out the obvious falsehoods. I foresee pundits playing that soundbyte tomorrow shortly before they point out all the obvious falsehoods she stated when she contradicted Biden. The fact check on this one will be fun. That said, I almost feel like Palin did better than Bush did in his first debate with Kerry...

I decided to stop playing the VP debate drinking game when Palin said "nukulur" 3 times in the span of 30 seconds

Senator O'Biden? Heh Her response on climate change is sickening. First she advocates a hypothesis which goes against an overwhelming amount of evidence, then she says she just doesn't care what the cause is. I'm glad Biden didn't let her get away from it. "How can we solve the problem if we don't understand the cause?" Excellent, Biden. Live stream here, by the way: http://www.cnn.com/video/live/live.html?stream=stream1

You seem to be a bit confused. ANSI C has a rather limited standard library. This says nothing about C the language, only the contents of "libc" POSIX provides a much more diverse selection of functions, most of which aren't available in ANSI C. That said, Scheme and Prolog are both interesting languages.

I think C is pretty useless without POSIX, or failing that, Win32 *groan*...

Who uses ANSI C anymore?

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html Very interesting article. They say that if anything, the bipartisan repeal of Glass-Steagall helped soften the crisis (and quote Bill Clinton saying the same thing). They list the real causes of the financial crisis as:

The American people don't seem too big on the bailout. Congress is getting bombarded with phone calls and e-mails telling them not to do it. So how do you sugar coat such a bitter pill? http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN0147494320081001 With tax cuts! Want some lower tax revenue with that $700 billion in new debt? It's like taking a pay cut and putting more on credit.

One would hope: the board, which would care a lot less about executive compensation when there's billions of government dollars in the bank

Well, clearly you've found the Singularity juju. Congratulations. I think negligible senescence is obtainable. However it's a little more than us being "programmed" to die. Aging has many causes and all of them would have to be addressed before we could reach a state of negligible senescence. Also to reach such a state you'd need to live a healthy lifestyle including caloric restriction and abstaining from alcohol/tobacco/other unhealthy things.

I'm a fan of Nick Bostrom, but I find the simulation argument unconvincing.

What science? Do you have a peer reviewed paper published in a major journal you could link us to?

Again I ask: what's the use case? Or more specifically, what's the use case where this scheme will be more effective than existing methods?

Not to mention no provisions against "golden parachutes" for CEOs and other C-level executives, one of the things that showed up in Congress's version. Given this administrations penchant of handing government money to their friends (e.g. Halliburton) I certainly don't trust them not to use the money to make their friends rich while everyone else suffers.

Interesting story from the Politico: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/14088.html Apparently McCain began disseminating word that he build the winning coalition to pass the bailout bill hours before it failed. This was subsequently followed hours later by McCain accusing Obama of "politicizing" the bailout and not putting "country first". You know, one presidential candidate is certainly seeming almost clownishly "partisan"

I support mandatory classes for mortgagors. I had to take them as part of my state-subsidized loan. They were extremely useful to me and certainly gave me pause to consider if I was really ready to take out a mortgage.

Sure, I'll happily concede that if you concede that the Republicans did something ten times as "partisan".

Well, the Dow just suffered the worst single day point loss ever, down 778 points. Black Monday still remains the worst percentage loss: http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/29/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm?cnn=yes What's more partisan, making a "partisan" speech, or not voting for needed legislation because the other party made a "partisan" speech? The content of the speech is not incorrect, although its timing was rather poor. If the speech is the reason the Republicans rejected the bill, their partisanship is a thousand times worse than Pelosi's.

There was some of that. As soon as McCain went into his played out soundbyte about his bracelet bearing a soldier's name as part of his overall talking point about the sunk cost of the Iraq war ("we can't let them snatch defeat from the jaws of victory", interesting metaphor there), Obama responded with a bracelet of his own, emphasizing that no soldier dies in vain and the cost of McCain's approach to honoring that soldier's memory in the way he's describing is... more dead soldiers. Overall Obama seemed more comfortable. Jim Lehrer wanted the candidates to talk to each other, which is something only Obama seemed to do. I heard "I agree with my opponent" pretty often out of Obama and "my opponent just doesn't understand" out of McCain, ostensibly an attempt to play up his experience.

That was a brilliant response on Obama's part. I think McCain got caught in a bit of say-one-thing-and-do-another. He skipped his interview with Letterman ostensibly so he could return to Washington DC. However, rather than doing that he gave an interview with Katie Couric. Then rather than go immediately back to Washington, D.C., he spends the night in New York. By the time McCain got there, nearly a day after saying he suspended his campaign, the deal had begun to fall apart. If this was as important as McCain was making it out to be, why not join together with Obama to work on the problem together, rather than singlehandedly taking it upon himself? The McCain campaign really feels like all strategy and no substance.

Some interesting polling figures on the debates: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/27/debate.poll/index.html?eref=rss_topstories