AngryLibertarian.com

Everyone seems to be missing the point on this one, so allow me to clarify.

The government shouldn't have anything to do with charity. If the American public supports a given charity, then they will donate to that charity on their own. Government funded charity amounts to a small group of politicians deciding to allocate other people's money to their favorite charities. This is a bad idea- crooked politicians will give to the charity which gives them to most kickbacks. Even if the government did a perfect job rating charities by effectiveness and chose the best one for each cause, why

When writing Python I typically compile my regexps close to their usage. While clean from a stylistic point of view, I was curious to see whether the "optimization" of taking re.compile statements out of a loop is worthwhile or if Python is already smart enough to cache identical regexp objects.

So I created the following three programs to test:

baseline.py -- which is optimal performance- manually stripping out the re.compile and only doing it once ahead of time.
normalcompile.py -- where I just call compile each time I use the regexp

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/20/AR200805...

The latest in politically correct idiocy. Even if you change the shape of paper currency or notch it somehow, the blind person still has no way of knowing whether they were given currency at all, or just paper of the same size as a given denomination. This is after tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars are wasted printing new bills.

Here is a snippet of my response to some poor soul on Google Finance. I thought I would preserve it for posterity :)

jstand...@gmail.com wrote:
> I'll be honest, I've always been skeptical of charts, technicals and
> price calling, but it may be due to ignorance.
> Would you mind to explain what the idea is if a stock fits into the
> pattern and then does not breakout?
>
> How are you able to pinpoint 187.6 so precisely and what happens if it
> peaks at 187.8 or 187.5? Does that mean the ascending triangle was
> incorrect?
>
> conschmi...@gmail.com wrote:

The following story has the headline "8 years later, HP does it Fiorina's way"
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/5777808.html

It goes on to say how Carly Fiorina, ex CEO of HP would approve of this latest bid for EDS. They seem to draw the conclusion that Carly was right all along. I draw the alternative conclusion, that Carly was wrong, and so is the current management. The market seems to agree with me, with HPQ down from a high of $49.89 at close on Monday to a low of $44.27 on Tuesday night.

Well this isn't technically my first python program since the Poor Man's VNC used python for rpc, but that was really short and easy. This program actually uses some of the fun functional programming elements.

It grew out of my aggravation trying to reproduce bugs and test procedures. My future vision is that all bug reports be submitted in executable format. This is the language which executes these bug reports. For any regressions we can just run a binary search overnight and sleep happy.

I got asked this when commenting on someone's website today. Obviously, the idea is to weed out spam bots, which are unlikely to have been programmed to handle such requests. But the idea struck me as more general, and it might be nice to weed out more than just spambots.

As a libertarian, I'm torn between who you root for (or rather against) in this primary contest.

On the one hand, I'm pretty sure Hillary will more aggressively attack freedom, but on the other hand, I'm also pretty sure that she will fare worse in the general election, so as much as I hate her, I think I'm forced to hope she pulls off this primary.

Although just about everyone has been saying Obama has already won for a while now, and I don't dispute the numbers, it is a little scary/ridiculous that Hillary won every state that anyone cares about:

VNC is nice, when you have a client. But I increasingly want access from machines without working VNC clients, or over connections which are so slow than VNC would never reach steady state since it would spend all its time updating the screen for minor changes, such as my iPhone (which actually has a VNC client, but would be unusable over T-mobile's EDGE)

So I implemented the poor man's alternative. A website "vnc.php" which has a JPG of my desktop, and when clicked, does the click for you and reloads the page so you can see the results.

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT
by Terry Bisson

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."