Month: December 2005
U.S. Troops Draw Up Own Exit Strategy | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
U.S. Troops Draw Up Own Exit Strategy | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
In a striking rebuke of the assertions of the Pentagon and the White House that a swift exit is neither practical nor possible, soldiers of varying rank have outlined a straightforward plan of immediate disengagement, dubbed “Operation Screw This.”
For years, Bush said court orders required for spying – Yahoo! News
For years, Bush said court orders required for spying – Yahoo! News
A must-read story. Again, and again, and again, and again, Bush reassured everyone who questioned the sweeping powers claimed under the USA PATRIOT act, that all the wiretapping required a court order and was under strict judicial oversight.
All while he had secretly subverted that requirement.
You have to read the article, read the quotes. Again and again and again he specifically cites the judicial oversight that did not exist to reassure people they were safe from government intrusion.
Unbelieveable.
Emacs Weenie
UPDATE: Steve says in the comments that he wrote this when he was “hammered.” It should be taken in that spirit. :) Very understandable.
The key to understanding Emacs is that it’s all about _efficiency_, which includes economy of motion. Any trained musician will tell you that economy of motion is critical to becoming a world-class virtuoso. Any unnecessary motion is wasted energy and yields sloppy results.
Using the mouse is almost always the worst possible violation of economy of motion, because you have to pick your hand up and fumble around with it. The mouse is a clumsy instrument, and Emacs gurus consider it a cache miss when they have to resort to using it.
Compared to Emacs Wizards, graphical-IDE users are the equivalent of amateur musicians, pawing at their instrument with a sort of desperation. An IDE has blinking lights and pretty dialogs that you can’t interact with properly (see Item 6), and gives newbies a nice comfortable sense of control. But that control is extremely crude, and all serious programmers prefer something that gives them more power.
I love emacs, but I hate rants like this. If this guy really cared about efficiency, he would have learned what interface specialists like Tog have known for eons: that keyboard shortcuts *feel* faster, but mouse motion *is* faster, empirically. I started reading this hoping for cool emacs ideas and I got to this paragraph and thought, “guess this guy prefers advocacy to facts.” After all, if he was all about economy of motion, wouldn’t he be using vi? No triple buckys!
If there was any question of this guy doing anything but chest-thumping, you could just read on to:
You don’t need a menu bar. It’s just a crutch placed there for disoriented newbies. You also don’t need a toolbar with big happy icons, nor do you need a scrollbar. All of these things are for losers, and they are just taking up precious screen real-estate. Turn them all off with the following code in your .emacs file:
“For losers”?
I can’t believe this made it to the front page of Reddit. Must be the LISP wankers.
If You Liked Chavez, You’ll Love Morales
World news from The Times and the Sunday Times – Times Online
FIVE centuries of white rule in Bolivia have ended with the election of the country’s first indigenous head of state.
Evo Morales, of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS), won more than 50 per cent of the vote in Sunday’s election, far outstripping all predictions. In his unprecedented first-round victory he left his nearest rival for the presidency, the pro-US Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, more than 20 percentage points behind. Addressing Bolivia’s main indigenous groups during his acceptance speech, Se�or Morales, who is an Aymaran Indian, said: “I want to say to the Aymaras, Quechuas, Guaran�es and Chiriguanos that for the first time we are going to be President.” Thousands took to the streets to celebrate. Su pporters crammed into trucks and drove around La Paz chanting “Evo to the palace, Tuto to Washington”.
Libertarians may forgive Morales his nationalization of gas reserves when they note that he is going to turn the nation into a grand experiment in drug legalization:
Señor Morales, who used to lead a coca-growers’ union, has promised to legalise the cultivation of coca, the primary ingredient in cocaine — to the horror of the US, which has pursued a big coca eradication effort in Bolivia in recent years. Bolivia is the world’s third largest producer of cocaine.
Oh, man, Washington is going to _*HATE*_ this dude. It makes me happy.