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Yeah it would seem a bit antequated in this day and age

While Congress has certainly aided and abetted the Executive, the latter is really where the power grab is going on. I'd expect that will soon cease, at least under Obama

The retarded "Recreate '68" people are standing around chanting random slogans at cops who have told them to get back. "When they say get back we say fight back!" and so forth. Watch it live: http://www.denverpost.com/dncall/ci_10284962

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=98343&catid=188 Unconfirmed reports! Possible white supremacists! Yeah, hard to say what's really going on, but if it's true, I can't say I'm too surprised...

And at the cost of environmental protections that hippie environmentalist nut George H.W. Bush felt were prudent enough to warrant an executive order. I'm surprised they haven't drug him out to tow the party line yet. Yes, one side of the fence is certainly overblowing this to absurd proportions...

Not seeing anything about warrants in there The problem is most of these civil rights violations aren't going through Congress at all, they're going through executive orders and internal policy of executive departments. Why do you think Senators are complaining about them, instead of using the power of their votes? They don't get a vote on this sort of thing. Quit trying to pin this on the people who are concerned for their civil liberties. Of course they're making noise. That noise stems from departments internally implementing unconstitutional procedures.

I think it's ironic he's claiming we have to drill now when he'll be dead before we see any benefit from it. But why the sense of urgency? The Republican talking point is most certainly now now now! John McCain has certainly made it sound like this sort of drilling will have an immediate benefit. However, it won't have any benefit within his own lifetime (probably). That's the point. Oh boo hoo. It's a comment about the sense of urgency he's placing around drilling and the fact that he'll be dead before we see any real benefit.

Not knowing the specific language, I'll still say that prying into personal records without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment.

First, keep in mind that alioth is the domain of micro-optimizers who have months to sit around coming up with the fastest solution for what are typically relatively trivial problems. So take it with a grain of salt... You might check out this article. The problem with D's compilers isn't the performance, but more compiler bugs. Speed is nothing without correctness: http://timburrell.net/blog/programming/2008-06-22/d-postmortem/ So what's your performance qualms surrounding OCaml? As you can see it does quite well on the alioth benchmarks, coming in at #6 overall (beating out Java). It's also a very high level language, certainly more so than D, and also a more mature one. While it certainly isn't the typical case, Naughty Dog used OCaml when developing the Jak and Daxter series.

Most garbage collected languages don't let you explicitly free objects. This is because there may still be outstanding references to the object elsewhere in the application, and if you could explicitly free and object these references would become invalid. This should be fairly easy to do with a recursive function which examines the children of a given node. That's where you should be doing your comparisons. If you're 'backtracking' up the tree you're doing something wrong.

wtf @ thread topic

Yes, McCain has been insisting that we have to drill here and we have to drill now, which is apparently some sort of Republican talking point as it seems to be parroted all over the place. However, McCain will likely be dead before it has an effect on gas prices, at least according to the DOE.

I think the problem here is the above now serves as enough to base an investigation on... this is just racial/ethnic profiling

McCain says we have to drill here and we have to drill now! (oddly enough, that's the same thing Newt Gingrich is saying, except he adds "Pay Less" at the end) McCain turns 72 in a week or so. By the time 2030 rolls around and offshore drilling actually has an effect on oil prices, he'll be 94 (i.e. most likely dead). Why exactly do we have to drill now? McCain will likely be dead before any benefit is seen.

I think it's more since the Bush Administration started an illegal wiretapping program, habeas corpus was suspended, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/washington/21fbi.html According to a letter signed by Russ Feingold, Richard J. Durbin, and Ted Kennedy, new FBI guidelines would allow them to investigate Americans, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities.” Why is it I feel like my civil liberties are eroding daily?

He needs to be in attack mode again. A bunch of feel good ads about how his policies will better American lives doesn't come close to convincing swing voters when they're seeing "OMG OBAMA IS HORRIBLE HE'S GUNNA RAIZE UR TAXES" ads from McCain. Personally I'm quite happy to see Obama on the attack and think the feel good ads were a big mistake. All that said, what did you think of the freelance ad? I think it's also important to note that McCain is making the same claims about Obama. It's just Obama's are a bit more substantive.

Rolling stone has named their pick for best ad of the campaign, and it comes from a freelancer: This guy did exactly what Obama's ads need to do: show the relationship between Bush and McCain and use Bush's horrible failures to sully McCain's image. The Obama campaign isn't doing that. The latest ad is okay... it shows McCain as being a rich douchebag who's out of touch with the American people, and so rich he doesn't even know how many houses he owns. It's nice to see the turnaround on this ad as this whole thing came out a few days ago, but still, I don't think ads like this are getting the job done: At the very end, we see the message: "We can't afford more of the same" That's the message Obama's ads need to be driving home. Right now they aren't.

I was hoping for a more inspired running mate than Joe Biden, but this choice is entirely expected...

I'm not saying they're being harmed, I'm saying they're not receiving the attention they deserve, and 9/11 and terrorism have received considerably more attention than they deserve.

Huh? What drugs have we developed and what problems have we solved thanks to 9/11?

It's not a boolean decision. We can work on several problems at the same time. But we really need to keep things in perspective. Over 3,000 Americans die of drowning every year. That's worse than 9/11 every single year. But where's the constant media coverage on drowning? Why isn't it a part of the national dialogue? Over 450,000 Americans die of heart disease every year. How much does heart disease enter into the national dialogue? Shouldn't it receive two orders of magnitude more coverage than 9/11? Our priorities are severely misplaced. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from preventable causes, and we're still babbling some 7 years later about how 2,700 Americans died in 9/11. Preventing terrorism should be a lower national priority than preventing heart disease.

Is it any weirder than discussing Obama's race or Hillary's gender?

To quote Lee Smolin: "There is nothing outside the universe"

Let's see... the Bigfoot legend: started by some guy who carved wooden feet and left "mysterious" tracks in the mud. Chances of there being some cryptozoological oddity roaming hick-filled hills? Pretty much zero. Yeah, can't say I'm surprised.