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I've posted quite a bit. One of the foremost sponsors of the teabagging is Freedomworks/Citizens for a Sound Economy, headed by former Republican house majority leader Dick Armey. ecoli denies he's one of the individuals behind it (but links sites sponsored by FreedomWorks) Then there's Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity pimping it 24/7: both registered Republicans. This is what happens when a real libertarian shows up to one of Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project Meetings I say "Republican" in lieu of "conservative" because there are actual libertarian conservatives who do care passionately about this stuff and have been complaining about the deficit even when Bush was in office, not to mention the Bush administration's totalitarian power grab and undermining of our civil liberties. I would certainly count a few members of these forums among them, like ParanoiA and ecoli. They aren't hypocrites. However, Republicans were cheerleading the Bush tax cuts even after we recovered from 9/11. Cut taxes and go to war? SURE! Give up our Fourth Amendment rights to protect us from terror? Fine! Record deficits? Who cares? Oh wait, a Democrat is in power? OMFG DEFICIT SPENDOCRAT BUREAUCRACY TYRRANY FASCISM BLAAARRRGH! Or the literal non-strawman version: "I'm not paying taxes anymore. I quit. [...] You've got kids in college? Get them out of college. They're brainwashing them. [...] BURN ALL THE BOOKS! [...] Understand we've got an enemy here. This is not just an election. It's a battle for survival" If these people haven't been making noise about these issues for the past 8 years but decide to do so now, they are comically hypocritical. Seriously, these people make me laugh. They have no real political platform or views, their politics consists entirely of opposing the opposite side and that's all there is to it. I blame these people for much of what's wrong with American politics today.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (a.k.a. SICP) is almost universally regarded as the best within the computer science community. If you click the link you will find their complete video lecture series available for download, taken from an actual class taught at MIT.

I'm a fan of writing correct programs quickly. Utility is in the eye of the beholder. Ever use YouTube? You can thank Python for that one. One of the more interesting apps I've seen demonstrated at our local Ruby group is a web application for controlling the power grid. That's some utility... literally. I'm a polyglot who doesn't fall victim to the Blub Paradox:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=nbody〈=all Interesting to see that Fortran only barely eeks out a lead over Scala... Haskell is only a little more than half as slow as Fortran. To reiterate from my previous post: Well, Haskell was the only language you listed which I was advocating for numerical computing, so let's look at some of that: do m <- foldr (.+.) (Vec 0 0 0) `fmap` (mapM momentum . take (nbodies - 1) . iterate next $ next planets) setVec (vel planets) $ (-1/solar_mass) *. m where momentum !p = liftM2 (*.) (mass p) (getVec (vel p)) Hmm, maps and folds... not particularly procedural at all. In fact, that's pretty much some quintessential functional programming right there. Colloquially (thanks to Google) this approach is typically described as a "MapReduce" and is an extremely easy operation to parallelize. There are ways to write imperative/procedural type code in Haskell, using things like the state monad. This program does not use them. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedHere's an interesting success story using Haskell for scientific modeling: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2009-April/017050.html

I want to be immortal... or at least to be able to live long enough that I'm sick of living

Yeah pretty much humanity is going to evolve into computers, lol

Well, going back to your quote: How can they possibly do that at the Pentagon when their balance sheets don't even add up? We don't know where the money is going.

Obama is taking something of a hardline stance over Israel's occupation of the West Bank: http://www.theage.com.au/world/obamas-stance-worries-israelis-20090417-aa90.html?page=-1 Essentially: want help dealing with Iran's fledgling nuclear program? Get out of the West Bank. Rahm Emanuel, whose father was a member of a militant Zionist group, is "laying down the law to Israel" Perhaps Obama can succeed where countless presidents in the past have failed (and Bush didn't even bother to try)

Unfortunately, this isn't the case at the Pentagon, which is the only federal department exempt from auditing. This isn't for reasons of national security, but rather because their accounting practices are a horrible, horrible mess and in dire need of modernization. There are literally trillions of dollars that have been pumped through the Pentagon which they can't account for: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/04/14/Pentagons-Accounting-Mess

It depends which ones you're talking about. Functional languages like Haskell and OCaml perform just fine: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all〈=all&box=1 Neither of the languages are interpreted. Both are compiled and execute as native code, and both provide unboxing for both integers and floats, making them both great for numerical computing. I'm not particularly a fan of Scala as a language but I've certainly heard of it being used in scientific computing. Having worked with a scientific model its operation followed this basic pattern: [math]t_1 = F(t_0)[/math] [math]t_2 = F(t_1)[/math] [math]t_3 = F(t_2)[/math] Or, that is to say, the state at each timestep is the result of a functional transformation of the previous timestep, an approach which maps quite well to functional languages. They think procedurally because they were taught to think procedurally. Again, it's a cultural thing. And moreover, the systems being modeled are described in terms of pure functions, are they not? Is it honestly easier to take a declarative description in the form of pure functions and translate it into an imperative procedure? Or is that just what everyone is used to... Yes, and COBOL was written for the business community, but even they eventually figured out it's retarded. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Yes, depending on what you're doing Java can be faster than C++ by virtue of its ability to automatically profile and recompile itself at runtime. And that's exactly what I said above: scientists are stuck in the 1980s when it comes to programming languages, simply because there's so much inertia dragging them down into low level imperative land. Fortunately I've seen gradual movement away from Java. My university was very much a Java school in the past but has since moved on to become far more polyglot oriented. MIT is switching to Python for the introduction to programming classes. Java is, sadly, in an "uncanny valley" of abstraction: not high level enough to model problems well, and not low level enough that students actually understand what's going on behind the scenes. This makes Java a particularly bad language to start out with. It's easy to think of modeling speed in terms of solely execution performance, but there are many hidden time costs to consider. Can your model resume where it left off if it crashes? If not, all the time that was spent running the model is wasted every time it crashes. How long is the debugging cycle? When you buy a new cluster, how much time is spent getting scientists up-to-speed on it? How often do you switch compilers, and how much time does it take to work out the kinks whenever making a compiler change? How long does it take to add new features to the model, or merge existing codebases? Where are the bottlenecks in your model, and how difficult is it to address them? One model I worked on had sinusoidal CPU usage because it would go between alternating periods of being CPU bound and I/O bound. Nobody could fix this because nobody knew how: the codebase was a gigantic mound of spaghetti and trying to make changes to core behavior was horrible black voodoo. This is the traditional "I'll write it in C... FOR SPEED!" trap, when really the amortized speed is a lot slower thanks to the amount of time it takes to address problems stemming from the language's low-level nature. You can laugh at Ruby if you want and try to argue it has no place in scientific computing, but really it's an issue of right-tool-for-the-job. While I would never advocate it or any other interpreted language for numerical computing (or even a JITed language with boxed integers/floats), Ruby is an excellent automation language. These maps are generated using a system which was automated using Ruby: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/night_light_posters.html I used Ruby frequently at my previous (scientific computing) job as an automation language for everything from scheduling jobs and letting scientists automate parameter tweaking for their runs to serving the data we generated through our web site. Again, right tool for the job. Yep, and that's exactly what I said before: Understand that this is the only good argument for using Fortran. You use Fortran because it's what everyone else is and has been using and what your legacy code is written in. It's not as if you have magical requirements that are different from anywhere else in the computing world which Fortran as a language fulfills. You're just doing numerical computing, and for that there are any number of languages that fit the bill. Financial analysts do numerical computing too, and guess what they're using? C++ and OCaml. Fortran is an old, archaic language riddled with a number of problems. No computer scientist working outside of scientific computing would ever even consider Fortran for new development. I think most competent computer scientists would do everything in their power to avoid Fortran. All that said: I can understand the rationale for Fortran (culture and legacy code). I can understand the rationale for C++ (higher level identity modeling and avoiding pointer hell). But if you're a scientist programming directly in C, sorry, you're just being silly. Find a better language, like this one perhaps: http://www.sac-home.org/

Fortran, C, and C++ SUCK. Why on earth would you ever argue these languages are easier for scientists to understand? Having supported an atmospheric model developed in Fortran and C for 5 years of my life, I can personally attest to the nightmares these languages bring to scientists. Scientists don't care about incompatibilities between Fortran compilers and are quite confused when they try to crank up the resolution of their grids and suddenly find their programs no longer run because they've exceeded some hardcoded maximums for array sizes in the compilers we were using. As scientists are well-versed in math, and implementing scientific models which are essentially translations of mathematical functions, I would think functional languages would in fact be easier to understand. Functional languages like OCaml have been immensely successful on Wall Street, where they're used for financial modeling. I think cultural reasons are to blame for why they aren't used more often in scientific computing: scientists aren't typically programmers by nature, but rather programming is something they must learn to do science. Scientists don't often develop models from scratch, but work with legacy, decades old models written in Fortran, C, and C++, so there's immense inertia to stick with low level imperative languages, even though the way they model problems is much, much different from how scientists use math to model programs, and these languages are difficult to use, error prone, and require substantially more code. Honestly, I think if scientists were exposed to functional programming first, they'd have a lot easier time. The only reason scientists would have a hard time understanding functional languages is because they were taught a language like C or Fortran first.

I'd like to learn Clojure, which is a concurrent Lisp dialect which provides first class support for software transactional memory

I'm confused as to you got "republicans are hypocrites" from a statement I made for the purpose of pointing out that Pangloss's suggestion that increases in the budgets of departments like the DOE probably isn't what Texans are mad at. If it is, the language they're using to describe it is, well, strange. That said, I'm still confused as to what they're referring to. Where is the "unprecedented expansion of power"?

Oh, it's certainly there. But I don't think anyone's trying to argue that those rallies didn't come largely at the behest of members of the Democratic Party.

If someone feels being a tax protester is worth going to jail that's their prerogative. But they should still go to jail.

Yes, and perhaps this deserves its own thread, but one way the government could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year is by eliminating separate commands in the Pentagon. There is considerable amount of administrative overlap which leads not only to inefficiency but means we must pay that many times more to duplicate those features in each command. Unifying command wouldn't reduce the size of our troops or cost them anything. It would be about streamlining the Pentagon and reducing waste. It would also come at the cost of a number of jobs.

I am surprised, and saddened, by what Obama has been doing in this regard. I still do not see why the existing FISA provisions (especially the ones which provide for retroactively seeking warrants in extreme cases) were insufficient. Perhaps Obama knows something I don't... meanwhile Obama is, at least in my mind, violating the US Constitution by continuing this program. I consider it wrong to violate the US Constitution and the sacred trust citizens place in the government not to spy on them without warrants, but maybe that's just me. What exactly is gained by not trying to seek warrants retroactively? It's not like we're preventing people from doing their jobs... they can do all the warrantless spying they want provided they can justify their actions to a judge after the fact. Why is this insufficient? Are you seriously arguing the only way to "prevent another 9/11" is to allow the government to perform surveillance they can't justify? I am extremely unhappy to live in a country that spies on its own citizens private communication without warrants. "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

Yes, this is retarded. Habeas corpus should apply to all US detainees. To do otherwise would be immoral. We should not be holding prisoners indefinitely unless they have been charged with a crime, and if they have been charged with a crime, they should be tried and convicted or released. I don't care if they've been labeled as enemy combatants. I don't care if they're not Americans. They're human beings.

How is expanding the budget of the Department of Education an "unprecedented expansion of power"? I don't see any expansion of power going on presently. I think there was unprecedented expansion of power a few years ago, especially when Congress granted the President the authority to spy on Americans without a warrant. As far as I'm concerned that's unconstitutional. What exactly are we seeing now?

Obama has unveiled the details of his plan today: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17train.html?_r=1 $8 billion of the stimulus money plus $1 billion yet to be allocated will be used to fund high speed rail projects in 10 areas that his people have identified would most benefit from high speed rail. Yep! (see the chart I posted above) But what do we do with this knowledge? Hybrids still don't solve traffic congestion. Also not everyone drives hybrids. Should we make hybrids mandatory?

She claimed it was "highly promoted by the conservative network Fox," which it certainly was. Former CNN turned Fox News personality Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project was one of the driving forces behind teabagging. Fox News devoted considerable airtime to it and I think there's little doubt the turnout can largely be attributed to Fox News's promotion. I think the fact that a network like CNN would ever employ a whack job like Glenn Beck really speaks to their desire not to come off as overtly left wing.

Nope' date=' but this does. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3fvNhdoc0 Yeah, looks like the two of them are just talking past each other, responding with red herrings. Seems a lot like what goes on in these forums That's not good reporting, but it's not a "gross display" to me. Not exactly sure how that reporter became a CNN correspondent, but I'd just chalk that up to ineptitude. As far as what constitutes a gross display, about about Cavuto's defense of why Fox News was devoting so much time to the teabagging? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UThpJCxzSYY Cavuto says Fox will be there, even though "some other news organizations" will not. In traditional hearsay-fueled "some people say" Fox News style, Cavuto doesn't mention which news organizations he's talking about, but ambiguously refers to the unnamed THEM who wish to stifle the teabagging. (Of course as evidenced from the clip above CNN was there, reporting ineptly) He notes these other, unnamed news organizations (or "THEM" in Cavuto-speak) covered the Million Man March. He takes this opportunity to note that unlike THEM, Fox News also covered the Million Man March, because it was a big deal "even though, as [Cavuto] pointed out, it was well short of a million men" Fox News didn't exist at the time of the Million Man March. The CNN reporter was rude and inept, but not dishonest. Fox News lied outright.

I was saying if Obama tried to take credit, it'd be similar to Bush style grandstanding. I hope I really don't need to demonstrate what I mean by Bush-style grandstanding, but it's not too hard: Obama doesn't swing that way.

Actually I was saying one of the principal organizers appears to be FreedomWorks/Citizens for a Sound Economy, headed by Republican Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=FreedomWorks