Pangloss

Back when I was at Georgia Tech in the early 1980s, this was the big social game that everyone played. Almost as popular (maybe more so) than chess. Engineers seemed to really take to it. But as video games took off I think this game has become somewhat relegated to the backwaters of retirement homes. None of my video game design students have ever played it; some had never even heard of it. So, just out of curiosity, does anyone here play it?

I realize we could collect more money and balance the budget at a higher expenditure level, if that's what you mean. In my opinion that's not an acceptable answer to the problem. That reaction would appear to say something about your own opinion, iNow, just as bascule's seemed to, earlier in this thread. I don't think either one of you are "entitlement guys", but it was an interesting (and surprising) reaction. Maybe we should explore the subject further. Take a closer look at what could be saved, what spending we might all agree should be increased, that sort of thing.

Are we having fun arguing about the paint on the barn while the horse roams free? THIS is why nothing ever changes, you know. I agree with this reasoning; thanks for being more specific. linr[/hr] John McCain is taking a stance on taxes this week, pledging not to raise them, and he's taking a hard hit from Democrats in light of the new deficit story. He's right and they're wrong. The problem isn't one we can solve by collecting more money. It's one we MUST solve by eliminating both nanny-state thinking and (I agree) overspending on defense. The budget makes this quite clear. Here's an LA Times story on McCain's tax position: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-campaign30-2008jul30,0,5820215.story

I blame IE. (And Canada.)

Perhaps that's what he meant. If so it's a great example of the narrow-mindedness of entitlement thinking, because it completely ignores the fact that military spending goes right into the economy at every level, from salaries to investors, and that money is far more efficient at padding retirement accounts than anything you'll ever get out of Social Security. No, I agree with you on that.

The thing about air cars is that it's not so much about developing an efficient transportation system as it is about developing far more sophisticated control and navigational systems. Put the average person in a Cessna at 5,000 feet and they probably wouldn't be able to find their way home, much less land the aircraft. Even in broad daylight, in clear weather, from just a few miles away. And god only knows what they'd run into; power lines, buildings, hills? It's quite amazing how complicated that third degree of movement makes things. 60 Minutes did a report a while back looking at all the air cars in development, and some of them mentioned computer stability control concepts that were promising, while others talked about more sophisticated, GPS-based navigational systems (more idiot-oriented than what they use now), but in the end I wished they'd just put the reported in a Cessna for a check flight. They'd have probably just nixed the story completely.

What in the world does that have to do with anything? I'm not allowed to observe what's happening because I bought Chinese goods? Huh? You want to chastise people for a perceived hypocrisy, fine, but I don't see how that automatically means we're overreacting. You're definitely missing a logic step or three there. And even so I don't see how that should stop people from commenting.

Yah I'm afraid I don't understand that reasoning at all. I guess tanks grow on really expensive trees.

Pardon me, that's what I get for late-editing. Quite right, servicing the debt is not entitlement spending, though it's certainly mandatory. Different subject, of course. So a little more than half the budget is on entitlement spending. And while I happen to agree with you about the DoD's budget, and you ignore the fact that China's spending is growing and they're rapidly approaching our military capabilities, you're still only talking about a quarter of the budget. Entitlement dwarfs defense. Dwarfs. So you're arguing about the barn door while the horse is running around tearing up the yard. Wanna keep arguing about that? Fine. There are roughly 1.5 million active members of the US military. At a roughly-national-average salary of $40,000 that's $60 billion on salaries alone. You wanna tell them they can only make what a Chinese soldier makes? To do so you'll have to abandon that other liberal favorite, the "living wage". The point being you're comparing apples and oranges. When China starts fielding stealth fighters and nuclear subs, and still has millions on the payroll demanding higher salaries, then we'll see what their budget is. Don't worry, at the rate they're spying on us, you shouldn't have to wait too long. Now, please explode some more two-wrongs reasoning at me about why we need to balance the budget AND increase entitlement spending. I'm all ears.

True, but like ecoli, that answer just feels "too easy" to me. It also feels partisan, like whatever Obama does will have a built-in excuse for failure (though I'm sure it wasn't meant that way). Democrats/liberals are complaining about deficit spending under Bush, and that's great, but they're doing so out of the left side of their mouth while the right side talks about increased entitlement spending, so we fix everything from global warming to the homeless. The projected budget is $3.1 trillion. Out of that, $1.9 trillion is mandatory entitlement spending on stuff Bush has little or no say on. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment/Welfare, and a quarter-tril (!) on servicing the debt. (Source) And liberals want to increase that $1.9 trillion in mandatory entitlement spending. Dramatically. So any Democrat who REALLY wants to "balance the books" is going to have to do so at the direct expense of popularity with his very base of support. Wanna bet?

The student loan situation is even worse than most people think, having taken several hits over just the last couple of years. Not only has it gotten much harder to get low-interest, government-backed loans, but these loans were actually included on the list of items that are exempt from bankruptcy protection. As if Fannie Mae needed help! But that's what a powerful lobby gets you these days. Fannie and Freddie spent over $200 million in its K-street lobbying efforts just in the past five years. And now it's getting additional protection in the form of a bailout to cover their bad investments into high-risk mortgage lending. Your money at work.

Yah I touched on this in this thread. I.E., a 14-digit debt. Pretty outrageous. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=34330 But I question whether anyone will be chastising the promised "Obama tax cuts" the way they deride the "Bush tax cuts". The unfortunate perception today is that tax cuts that come from Republicans are evil, corporate greed that harm the budget. Tax cuts that come from Democrats are for the common good and don't really hurt the budget very much. And to some extent that's understandable, given that it's a spending problem, not a collections problem. It would be interesting if the people had a more direct say in how much money the government was given to spend, and a balanced budget was constitutionally mandated. (You know... that kind of amendment might actually pass if it included a clause that allowed for deficit spending in times of war, especially if it were phrased such that the declaration of war in question had to be congressional as well as executive.)

Anybody check out Cuil (pronounced "cool"), the new search engine from former Google employees? http://www.cuil.com Unfortunately it's been up and down all day, and reportedly very sporadic in news accounts as well. They do have a Firefox module (for that search thingie in the upper-right corner), which is nice, I like the way they organize search results to take advantage of widescreen monitors. Here's a screen shot: That's from this Ars Technica article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080728-ex-googlers-launch-biggest-search-engine-on-the-web.html They say it has the largest index, with over 120 billion pages, but last week (not coincidentally, I'm sure) Google released a press statement claiming they have a trillion pages indexed. Whatever.

When China won the Olympic games, one of the things it agreed to do was a bit unusual -- it promised not to censor media reporting on anything related to the games, and to allow uncensored Internet access within the Olympic village before and during the games. It's already broken these promises several times, the most recent incident taking place on Friday. Apparently thousands of people were waiting in line to purchase tickets and a fist-fight broke out around 4am. Hours later, in daylight after the incident was over, reporters were turned away from people standing in line whom they wanted to interview. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601079&sid=aPC.9tPGRc8Q&refer=home The Wall Street Journal reports that some journalists were arrested and others were required to destroy footage. It goes on to talk about how this news is being censored within the media centers of the Olympic village. I could find only those two stories about the incident through Google News, though granted it's not a huge incident. Others attending at the Olympics are also reporting censorship unrelated to this event. Amnesty International's web site is blocked, for example, according to various blogs. I'm thinking that now that the games are about to begin, there's little the International Olympic Committee can do -- they can hardly pull the games at this late hour, and doing so would likely be seen by most (including me) as an overreaction. I think what should happen is that the media needs to wake up and shine a VERY bright spotlight on this issue, instead of the dim and half-noticed one they're kinda/sorta/thinking-about shining on it now.

I really need to get Showtime unlocked again.

This was a new episode?

Hmm, that's not really the image I had in my mind for mermaids. Oh well.

Congress passed the housing bill today and the president is expected to sign it immediately. Not that that simple name really explains the 684-page bill very well. - Bailouts for homeowners in trouble - Bailouts for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae - $7,500 tax credit for first-time home buyers - Tax breaks for home builders and companies in the home construction industry - Raises the national debt ceiling to $10.6 trillion (14 digits) to pay for all this (an increase of $800 bil) And the proverbial partridge in a pair tree (i.e. earmarks galore): This bill basically allows lawmakers to spend about 1.1 trillion dollars, entirely at their discretion. Gee, I wonder if they'll find some way to spend it. I think we've just signed ourselves up for a lot more debt for no good reason. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/washington/27housing.html?hp

We've been using Alice (the IDE, not the language) to teach introductory programming, but I've always found the interface clunky and confusing, and so far from what the students end up doing later as to almost render the experience moot. Our students seem to have trouble separating what they learn about programming from what they've learned about Alice in particular. The next class they take introduces them to writing Windows apps in Visual Basic, which is just a whole different ball of wax. (From there they go to an advanced Windows forms class, then my ASP.NET course, where they learn some C# to compliment their VB knowledge.) For a long time we taught them pseudocode using Microsoft's cheesy old PS "compiler", but that thing is no longer supported and I haven't seen a textbook for it in years. There're a lot of textbooks out there on Visual Basic, but I haven't seen any that focus on programming fundamentals -- they're about teaching Visual Basic (which is kind of a sucky language to learn fundamentals in anyway). I'm just curious if anyone here might have any suggestions. The Wikipedia has an article on Educational Programming Languages, which has been somewhat useful in my explorations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_programming_language One that struck me as interetsing is Greenfoot. It's an IDE based on BlueJ, which is an EPL based on Java, which of course presents a little bit of a conflict (since they go to VB next), but we're considering dumping VB for C# anyway, which uses the same syntax. Typical Greenfoot screenshot: That is both the IDE and the run-time module, which means you get some real-time manipulation of the code, which is really useful for educational purposes. Code is typed into a separate window that you call up by double-clicking on the class object. At that point it looks like normal Java, which is supplemented and simplified by the BlueJ and Greenfoot libraries. Some typical code: /** * Let the gravity change the speed. */ private void applyGravity() { speed += moon.getGravity(); } /** * Whether we have touched the landing platform yet. */ private boolean isLanding() { Color leftColor = moon.getColorAt(getX() + leftX, getY() + bottom); Color rightColor = moon.getColorAt(getX() + rightX, getY() + bottom); return (speed <= MAX_LANDING_SPEED) && leftColor.equals(moon.getLandingColor()) && rightColor.equals(moon.getLandingColor()); } So I'm checking it out and it looks useful so far (and especially attractive now that Prentiss Hall is coming out with a textbook on it next month). But I wanted to check here and see if anybody had any suggestions or ideas, especially with regard to Greenfoot (experiences, problems, etc). Thanks!

If memory serves, pole reversal is also thought to be a possible (if unlikely?) precursor to an overall reduction in the strength of the field, which of course would lead to the eventual loss of atmosphere (ala Mars). I think that theory is pretty unsupported at present, though. I remember seeing a Nova on it, but then we talked about it here and people said it wasn't very likely.

"Look out, he's got a board with a nail in it!" (One of my favorite Simpsons quotes.)

That's interesting, I will have to read up further on those subjects. I'm still determined to introduce non-Microsoft methods into my Web applications course, although I still have not done so. I have a special topics class I may be teaching in the winter that I may be able to do something along those lines with. That doesn't surprise me about it not being new; Microsoft's strengths lie more in the area of developing ideas than creating them. Lots of cash on hand + thousands of programmers sitting around = something. Of course, whether that something turns out to be useful or not is another question. One of the problems with that approach is that you end up having to continue to support that something forever afterwards. Leads not only to bloat but to complicating the very thing you're trying to simplify -- the learning curve. Anyway, just to expand on the discussion a bit, I went to a meeting of .NET programmers the other day, and we were shown a bit of something that MS plans to introduce into the framework soon called the "Entity Framework". The general idea of it is that you can map your data infrastructure to a set of "entities" (like classes but different) which are mapped out in XML-based form in your application. It seemed to me that basically what they were talking about is replacing the middle tier of a standard n-tier arrangement with this entity framework. It would be more responsive to changes through the use of updating wizards and methods. And you could create "entities" for events as well as tables, so for example you could have an entity that was basically just an SQL query, and then call that query as an object in your code. Just to map that against the LAMP world, based on what Bascule wrote about, it sounds to me a lot like the Ruby ActiveRecord concept, with Ambition taking the role of LINQ. Does that sound about right?

Sometimes I think the big-name journalists overcompensate for their liberal bias (and Obamania) by showing zeal in their questioning of liberal politicians. Actually covering up a gaff makes no sense, though -- it is quite appalling; that's the right word for it. It's probably worth noting that CBS News is widely considered a badly misguided and mismanaged organization at the moment. Howard Kurtz' recent book "Reality Show" was quite an eye-opener.

Just curious if anyone else has messed around with LINQ. It stands for Language Integrated Query, and it's Microsoft's effort to move the SQL language into the programming domain before compile time. One advantage of this is that using Visual Studio 2008 you get after-the-dot methods and usability assistance with your SQL while writing actual programming code. The real advantage of it is that it enables a kind of higher-level organization and management of your data infrastructure. Right now in most n-tier, data-driven business applications you work something like this: - Presentation Tier (theme/skin/css, buttons, grids for display, etc) - Information Tier (classes containing objects typically populated via ADO code with data acquired with a "data access" class) - Infrastructure Tier (database stuff: SQL queries, views, stored procedures, functions, etc) The biggest drawback of this approach has always been complexity and usability, which of course means long learning curves. Back in 2004/2005 Microsoft took a kind of "first stab" at improving things by introducing a new design-time object called the "DataSource" (e.g. "SqlDataSource"), which is a parameterized, drag-and-drop toolbox object that the user can configure with Visual Studio properties and/or HTML parameter tags. Then the object compiles it executes code stored in the operating system (in the .NET Framework) which writes the actual data access code (the ADO) on the fly. The drawback of THAT approach is that it didn't support n-tier architectures very well. Great for simple web apps, but not great for enterprise software. Those people ended up ignoring or bypassing the new objects, leaving us back at square one. The LINQ approach supports n-tier architectures, but still allows for relatively easy configuration. It gets people out of ADO code and into designers that are easier to learn and manipulate, which still allowing for enterprise-grade development. I didn't mean this to sound so much like an advertisement for Microsoft, really I'm just trying to spark a little discussion about the future of n-tier business apps, if anyone's interested.

Moved into a new thread. I agree with iNow above. I thought about this some more following the resolution of my thread on McCain's banking flap and bascule's thread on McCain's Anwar Awakening gaff. I've never felt that a rule about this would be either necessary nor a good idea, since we have an intelligent and consistent group of regulars that pretty much keeps things on an even keel, but I'm absolutely determined to see our political discussions remain at a high intellectual and philosophical level. So as far as I'm concerned anything goes, but if I start to see a lot of cheesy, partisan material that belongs on (or comes from) places like Democratic Underground or Free Republic, I'm not gonna be a happy moderator. 8^D <-- happy moderator =8(G <-- surprised and unhappy moderator showing injured delete finger