"Pull the other one. It’s got bells on."

Gary King on the horribly underreported conflicts of interest with former military leaders simultaneoulsy taking positions as Big Media war analysts and going on the take as contractors and investors in the military-industrial complex. Does anyone care that the Pentagon's coaching these slimy bastards went up to at least Rumsfeld (at the time) and porbably well into the Whitehouse itself?

Billions of USD are being wasted (and in fact borrowed from China, et al.) EACH MONTH lining the pockets of the people who go on TV and play up the war in order to attract advertisers and instill fear in the general population. Meanwhile baby-faced young men and women are losing limbs, their brains are shelled into jelly, and losing their lives.

I'll vote for any presidential candidate who promises to reinstitute the draft, without exceptions. That is the only action I can see ending this boondoggle in the next year or so. That is the only thing I can see getting enough people's attention to really care about the endless death and destruction and blatant robbery and profiteering. As long as the vast majority of our children are safe, we seem unable to care about those who chose to protect our _constitution_ and have wound up losing their lives and limbs doing anything but.

Why we've not gone up to the door of the Whitehouse and dragged the bastards directly into the courts ourselves is beyond me. Now excuse me, American Idol is on.

Oh and remember: the next president will likely nominate three supreme court justices. And you want McBush, er, McCain, to be the one for that? As long as you like the concept of the "unitary executive". W's men are already on the court putting this theory into practice.

Objectively

"Rubinius switched from C to C++ to implement it's core VM"

For the life of me I cannot understand why projects use C++ rather than Objective-C. Hmm.

Catching up on comments to this post...

Yeah, I can be too brief sometimes. Here's the essence of what I like about ObjC vs. C++. ObjC attempts to keep the Obj and the C distinct, while C++ attempts to combine them. As a result the Obj in ObjC is very much like the Obj in Smalltalk. And the C on Obj C is very much like the C in ANSI C.

The Obj in C++ is significantly more complicated than the Obj in Smalltalk or in ObjC. The C in C++ is also significantly more complicated, to the point where I don't think it can be called "C". People will talk about the expressiveness of C++ and how much it has evolved over the years. I still very much prefer the simplicity of ObjC.

I am also surprised the ObjC has portability issues. With the GNU implementation?

And I am surprised about the Ruby kernel issue as well. I also thought this would be so small to warrant just C or even better, a subset of Ruby that compiles easily into C. This is what Squeak uses for its kernel. Gambit Scheme does something along the same lines, allowing a very C-ish dialect of Scheme that translates directly.

The Manchurian Minister

In reference to James Snell's recent post and subsequent comments
about Obama and Jeremiah Wright. This is a Big Media misdirection.

What about McCain's follies, e.g. singing "Bomb, bomb, bom, bomb. bomb
Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boy's "Barbara Ann"??? Do you want this
person to lead the free world???

What about McCain refusing to stand down from John Hagee's
endorsement??? Hagee being the self-proclaimed "Christian" who to this
day believes the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is
due to homosexuality.

Politics. I'm not crazy about Obama or any candidate, but I'll take
anyone who's a bit more on stable ground than McCain. Holy cow.

In a comment on James' post, about Obama, the comment claims that…
"Every day a new skeleton comes out."

Do we have a list of these skeletons somewhere? Every day since when?
How many skeletons are there?

Does Obama have a track record in government of legislating along the
lines of what this supposed Manchurian Minister would dictate?

Is the Big Media doing a service or disservice on this topic? It seems
not to be digging deep about anything, certainly not about Obama's
actual track record and certainly not anything about the untouchable
McBush, I mean, McCain. The Big Media does seem determined to keep the
wound open and never find a way to close it one way or another.

People get the government and the media they deserve, to borrow a
phrase from Phil Windley.

Update:

I'll tell you what, looking at the comments over on James' post, it's *rul* scary how different people's opinions are from mine. There is a *huge* divide in our thinking. I don't know if I'm right or not, but I have my guesses.

Huh?: "The fact that it runs on its own interpreter, bad."

What is this obsession with some virtual machine being the one, true byte code? The Java Virtual Machine, the CLR, Parrot, whatever. Give it up.

I agree with Steve Vinoski...

The fact that it runs on its own interpreter, good; otherwise, the reliability wouldn’t be there.

We need to get over our thinking about "One VM to bring them all and in the darkness bind them". Instead we should be focused on improving interprocess communication among various languages. This can be done with HTTP and XMPP. And we should expecially be focused on reliability, deployment, starting and stopping locally or remotely, etc. XMPP's "presence" provides Erlang-process-like linking of a sort as well.

With Erlang's JInterface for Java then a Java process can look like an Erlang process (distributed or remote). Two or more Java processes can use JInterface to communicate and "link" reliably and Erlang virtual machines and libraries, save this one single .jar, do not have to be anywhere in sight.

To obsess about a single VM is to remain stuck at about 1980 and UCSD Pascal's p-code. It just should not matter today, and certainly not tomorrow. The forest is now much more important than any given tree.

Pay attention to the new JVM from IBM in support of their lightweight, fast-start, single-purpose process philosophy embodied in Project Zero. It's not intended to be a big honkin' run everything forever virtual machine. It will support JVM languages and the more the merrier in the sense that such a JVM will enable lightweight pieces to be stiched together dynamically. However the intention is to perform some interprocess communication and then get out of the way. Exactly the right approach for any virtual machine.

Jini clearly is *the* most important thing about Java, ever. But it's lost. Gone. Buh-bye. Pity.

Flash Now Even Openier

Adobe continues to open up more in the world of Flash. Sure, if you like the browser as an application platform, go for it.

This one's better and doesn't hurt the web any more than anything else unless you, the developer, choose to. You can hurt the web just as badly in the browser without hardly trying.

Update for Ed:

2nd Bar Camp Portland - May 2-4, 2008

http://barcamp.org/BarCampPortland

Wallhoo or Yahmart?

I stand by my very brief post a few weeks ago: yahoo and wallmart should merge. Yahoo has the internet savvy and infrastructure. Wallmart has the sales and distribution. Yahoo needs to get out from under search and ads as their model. Wallmart needs to get on the web better to compete with Amazon, Apple's itunes, etc.

Who else is going to compete with Amazon? I wonder if a Google / Wallmart merger would go through? Not as likely as Yahoo, and Google does not (yet?) feel the need like Yahoo should.