Thursday, October 02, 2003

Summer Camp. This is my simple test: Have you been to Summer Camp?  Was it a religious Summer Camp?  Were there guns there?  Did you learn how to use them?  While doing this, did you talk of overthrowing any governments?  Was there a category of people that you decided to hate, to kill? I like to see folks practice their religion.  Go to it.  Figure out your relationship with God.  But if you've attended a Summer Camp somewhere, well, I really don't give a shit about what happens to you.  Even if you didn't do it.  You went to camp, and you made your choice. 8:55:11 PM     | comment [] | trackback []

You MUST Publish My Book. David Bernstein writes a book on free speech. His book apparently makes use of bog-standard conservative/libertarian examples, and is fairly hostile to what a potential publisher termed "standard social mores".  The publisher turns down the book, and Bernstein points to this as yet another example of Left-Wing Bias.  Since when is a publisher required to publish Bernstein's book?  This particular publisher feels his example set, driven by right-wing principles, is not something that should come from their house. A publisher takes responsibility, and is often associated with, the books they publish. A vigorous defense of the first amendment counched in Right Wing politics is just noise in a partisan suit.  If Bernstein had managed to write said vigorous defense and stayed neutral, the rejection might not have happened.  Play with the bull; get the horns.  If you want to indulge in the luxury of promoting your political views while writing serious material, don't expect it to be taken seriously by a significant chunk of your audience, or your potential publishers. If Bernstein had written a book a free speech that promoted Communist doctrine as a primary theme, he might likely have had the same response.  It's the same boring Right Wing crap -- if the reaction to non-sensical mutterings is negative or critical, it's not a reaction any more.  It's bias.  Grow up.  Figure out who published Treason, and you'll find plenty of like-minded friendlies. 5:17:01 PM     | comment [] | trackback []

User Pays. Demonstrating a substantial inability to pull apart these crazy political money issues, John Hawkins castigates John Kerry's notion that we should roll back some of the top bracket tax cuts.  Here is a very simple way to think about this whole situation: Ultra-rich one-percenter folks are the ones who support Bush; they paid for his Presidency. Bush policy is to deficit-finance pre-emptive wars based on deceptive reasoning. Rich, one-percenter people can damn well pay for the war they bought, since they put him in office. In other words, let's go user-pay on this. 4:28:12 PM     | comment [] | trackback []

My Eclipse Wish List. Move member function somewhere outside its hierarchy. Export/import breakpoint set (I have complex ones with filters I would like to share). Common LISP support. Scheme support. Jess support. Splitting of editor windows Fast numbered bookmarks like JBuilder (ctrl-shift-# to set, ctrl-# to go to). Better decorators to show cvs modification status (they're too small). A "reconfigure" mode for large projects, where I can turn off updating until I'm finished making project changes.  Then, it refreshes and rebuilds everything. Better compaction of the debugger view -- filter out regular, running threads. Hotkey-based pop-out object inspection (nice big window for complex objects). Less finger-painful hotkey for Quick Fix.  Control-1 is a stupid key for anything, dammit.  OK, I guess I can remap this myself, but really, man...what were you thinking? Never auto-open imports in outline. Resource History should be full window, not a tab. 3:19:44 PM     | comment [] | trackback []