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The guy's openly giving the finger to Congress. That's not theater. His ass should be in jail.

I'm more concerned about McCain's gaffe being edited out of the interview

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-he8f7AdVl4IRQAEFnivpPn6HOAD9289GU00 Although it's still unclear if Pelosi will allow a final vote. Rove broke the law... it's about time the House Sergeant at Arms was sent to arrest him. Unfortunately Congress has a reputation for being too spineless to stand up to Bush.

When the density is constant the latency is constant. You'd be hard pressed to find a scheme whereby you could use error correcting bits elsewhere in the stream to combat the extremely pessimistic case of minor corruption of several blocks in a row while still guaranteeing low latency. It all depends on what your use case is: are you trying to combat corruption in transmission, or corruption on disk? Also: is latency a factor? In all the cases I gave above low latency is generally quite important. Well again, it depends on the use case: are you worried about data in transit, or data on disk? In either case, the data is decomposed into blocks by the underlying mechanism. In the case of data transmission, the data is generally packetized, and in the case of data on disk it's broken down into sectors. Corruption of transmitted data will generally occur at the packet level: the entire packet will be dropped. These are the cases where block-based schemes like erasure coding are quite handy. The same thing often occurs with data on disk: the hard drive will be completely unable to read a sector. Instead of getting back a chunk of corrupted data, you get no data because a read error occurred. So the question becomes what use cases do you envision where you're actually getting back corrupted data as opposed to missing a chunk of data? It have to be one stream that can say that something has just been wrong - we don't see the pattern(redundancy) we've placed there - we have to try to fix neighborhood of this point until the pattern emerge again as it should.

That's not to mention that the Pentagon can't account for trillions of dollars because its accounting processes are so antequated and error-prone: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/04/14/Pentagons-Accounting-Mess This some 18 years after Congress required major federal agencies to be audited... the Pentagon still can't be.

For the record, Google claims to have 1 trillion pages in their index: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

I used China as an example because they're the #2 military spender in the world. Russia is #3 with $50 billion. Is there any reason we're spending an order of magnitude more on our military than the #2 highest military spender in the world after us? Or, for that matter, more than the rest of the world combined? I never said we should increase entitlement spending. I'm perfectly happy getting rid of the $644 billion we spend on social security, but yeah, that third rail thing...

It'd require errors be scattered across multiple blocks. This technique has been used quite successfully in all sorts of fields, namely "forward error correction" employed by cell phones, satellite transmissions, HDTV, Joost, and systems like Tahoe. It's pretty much the de-facto error correction system employed today for one-way transmissions where schemes like ARQ aren't possible.

Pangloss, I think it's incredibly dishonest to call the $260 billion we're paying as interest on the National Debt "entitlement spending". When you put that aside, the remaining mandatory spending adds up to ~$1,636,000,000,000. The single biggest expense on the US budget is the Department of Defense, which weighs in at a whopping $660,600,000,000 when you include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, beating out Social Security which weighs in at a hefty $644,000,000,000. That said, the $515,400,000,000 the DoD receives sans the wars is more than the defense spending of all other nations on earth combined. That's ludicrous. Why are we spending that much on defense? If we cut our defense spending to, say, just twice China's $59 billion defense budget, spending a total of $118,000,000,000 on defense, that alone would bring the budget defecit from $482,000,000,000 to $84,600,000,000, and that doesn't even include any changes to the spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we could further cut our spending on the "War on Terror" in half, say by ending the war in Iraq, that would bring the budget deficit down to $12,600,000,000. And if taxes on millionaires returned to Clinton era levels, we'd bring in an additional $90 billion per year, resulting in a $77,400,000,000 SURPLUS. I couldn't care less about Social Security, but that's clearly an unpopular opinion among those who've paid into it for decades.

I think the state-of-the-art in this regard is erasure coding, using methods like Vandermonde Matrices. This allows for extremely pessimistic cases by incorporating a high degree of redundancy. For example Tahoe, a secure distributed "global" filesystem, uses erasure coding to safely distribute files across a number of peers which are assumed unreliable. Depending on how you configure it, only a fraction of the peers are needed to successfully reconstruct the file (1/4, I believe). The blocks these algorithms operate on are much larger than individual bytes. But still, only having 1/4 of the original data available is a pretty pessimistic case, and erasure coding deals with it just fine (at the cost of quadrupling the size of your stored data).

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/28/2009.deficit/index.html ...which will quite likely be enough to push the national debt over the $10 trillion mark. It appears the neocon "spend more, tax less" approach to fiscal policy has failed miserably. The present national debt represents almost $32,000 for every man, woman, and child in the US. I really hope a new administration will focus on massively reducing budget deficits, hopefully employing a "tax more, spend less" approach to fiscal policy. It'd be good to see the Bush tax cuts rolled back, and hopefully we'll elect a president who can get us out of Iraq and stop the country from profusely bleeding money.

Yes, season 6 episode 6: "Being Green"

Anyone catch this? I can't say I was surprised, but I was certainly disappointed. Their overall sentiment wasn't too bad. They did point out what a farce carbon offset schemes are, and found a bunch of people who were clueless and misinformed yet cashing in on others' good intentions. However, rather than interviewing any climate scientists they trotted out some "free market" think tank bozo to make their point, and also the guy who started the weather channel. They usually manage to find scientists of higher caliber to make their point, but at the same time they usually aren't arguing against the scientific consensus. The end of the episode featured Penn hopping into a confessional to admit that he can't say "global warming is bullshit" because he doesn't know. That was a nice touch. However it doesn't change the fact they're making specious claims that contradict known science.

ActiveRecord is the most popular Object Relational Mapper (ORM) for Ruby. That said, Java probably did the best job popularizing the concept with Hibernate. Googling for ORMs for .NET, there are dozens available. I'm not sure which of them are particularly popular, but this site lists quite a few of them: http://csharp-source.net/open-source/persistence

LINQ is an interesting idea, but certainly not a new one. One of the earliest systems I know doing this sort of thing is Erlang. Like other languages such as Python and Haskell, Erlang supports a language construct called a list comprehension, which is basically a declarative way of querying and transforming one or many lists into a single result. Erlang took the extra step of using list comprehensions to perform queries against its database. However, rather than loading the complete contents of one or more database tables into memory in the form of a list, database tables act like "virtual lists" to the list comprehensor. This is accomplished using a technique known as a parse transformation, where the original language syntax you enter is programmatically transformed into something completely different. It's a similar idea to macros in Lisp. This idea inspired an extension to Ruby's ActiveRecord called Ambition, which allows you to work with databases using the same toolset Ruby uses for querying arrays and other array-like data structures (called Enumerable). Ruby's approach to this is generally quite functional, making use of lamba expression-like things (blocks) and higher order functions when describing the desired transformation. I really prefer the above approaches over something like LINQ, as there's no disconnect between how the programmer would normally operate on the language's first class data structures and how they operate on databases. However, LINQ is trying to solve the problem of adding these sort of functional / declarative approaches to languages which don't have them in the first place, and in that regard it's probably done the best job possible. All that said, it's certainly much better than the nightmare which is SQL...

I just watched the entire segment from CBS, and I am appalled. Clearer, she says, having deliberately covered up McCain's gaffe... Katie Couric's interview with Obama was, to say the least, extremely pointed. The entire interview effectively consists of her asking Obama one question over and over again, which is effectively "No really, do you still think the surge was a bad idea?" In the interview, Obama suggested that the Sunni Awakening and the Shiite government going after militias was also responsible for improving the security of the country. This was the lead-in to the question where McCain blatantly demonstrated his ignorance. McCain's response to Couric's question, which was cut from the interview, began: McCain's response begins by stating that Obama does not understand the history surrounding the Surge and is falsely depicting the historical events. Immediately after making this claim, McCain demonstrates that he does not understand the history of the Surge and falsely depicts the historical events. Katie Couric repeatedly badgered Obama about the Surge, then edited the McCain interview so as to hide his ignorance. Then she has the audacity to claim that the candidates "differences on the wars have never been sharper or clearer". What atrocious journalism. I'm appalled.

I felt the McCain gaffe re: the Anbar Awakening was a bit more notable as CBS deliberately manipulated the interview footage to hide it.

Stargate sucks

Is that all a big sarcastic wad of sh*t, or are you actually serious about all of that? I'm leaning towards the sarcastic wad of sh*t...

An expert is warning that there's a link between cell phones and cancer, even though numerous peer reviewed research papers contradict his opinion: http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/07/23/cancer.cell.phones.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories He's basing his concerns on "unpublished data." I consider this irresponsible, and wonder why the moniker "expert" would ever be applied to individuals of this nature.

This entire thing reminds me of the debacle surrounding Bill O'Reilly claiming that U.S. soldiers massacred Nazis at Malmédy: As it turns out, O'Reilly got it wrong. Nazis massacred U.S. forces at Malmédy. FOX News edited the transcript to correct O'Reilly's gaffe. Those are the sort of things I would expect of Bill O'Reilly and FOX News. They are not the sort of things I would expect from a U.S Presidential candidate and CBS. Read harder:

He's claiming that the Surge was responsible for an event which occurred in 2006, prior to McCain even having the opportunity to vote on the Surge, and using that in support of his decision to vote for the Surge and also using that to lambaste Obama's decision to vote against the Surge. This is a blatant falsehood. McCain is claiming the Surge lead to the Anbar Awakening. It's no more truthful than claiming that we have the Surge to thank first public elections in Iraq, or the ousting of al-Sadr. These things both occurred before the vote for the Surge, let alone the Surge itself. The Surge occurred in 2007. You can't attribute things that happened in 2006 to the Surge. Ad hominems against Olbermann aside, the video speaks for itself. CBS removed McCain's response to the original question and replaced it with the answer to a different question completely. They edited out the gaffe. This is dishonest journalism.

CBS cut out his mistake for him, but unfortunately for McCain the original footage was discovered: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/us/politics/24check.html This raises the question of how well McCain actually understood the surge when he voted for it. McCain has been triumphantly trumpeting his approval of the surge in 20/20 hindsight of its outcome, the entire time disparaging Obama for voting against it and instead suggesting an early withdrawal. CBS decided to cut directly to the remarks which disparaged Obama, omitting McCain alluding to the Anbar Awakening which occurred months prior to the surge as one of its successes. This is completely wrong. Perhaps the worst part of this is CBS cut McCain's original response to the question and instead substituted the answer to a completely different question. This is pathetically dishonest journalism. Original footage available here, including a side-by-side comparison of his original response and what was actually aired: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIAsS9VXiM line[/hr] Mod note: For similar Obama gaff, without CBS edit, see page 2.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/07/23/obama-incorrectly-claims-membership-of-senate-committee/ Exhaustion? Is it me, or is Obama starting to look a bit gray around the edges?

I think one of the things that people overlook regarding WWII is that most of the countries involved suffered enormous damage and human casualties, and America did not (comparatively). America was in the rather lucrative position of having built up its infrastructure, rather than having it destroyed, and in turn being in a good position to help the rest of the world rebuild their respective infrastructures.