Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

We were just talking about why Palin did better tonight than she did in her interviews. I think it's actually very simple. No follow ups. It's not a criticism of Gwen Ifill. It wasn't the format she was supposed to work with. But if you look at Palin's interview trainwrecks things always got bad on the follow up -- when the interviewer (Gibson or Couric) pressed her on the nebulous answer for some specifics, which she couldn't provide. That's the difference.

The Swamp reports today that “on the last day of September, the national debt hit $10 trillion plus,” as the “gross national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product has, under the Bush Administration, hit a 50-year high. The debt grew the fastest under supply-siders Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush:

The debt was $5.7 trillion when Bush took office; the bailout legislation passed by the Senate last night would raise the debt ceiling further to $11.315 trillion. The Wonk Room has more.

Can't wait another hour and a half until the debate? Well never fear, we have your opportunity to ask Sarah Palin and Joe Biden absolutely anything you can think of with our handy "Ask the VPs" application below.

Don't forget to check back at 9:00 pm EST for our VP Debate LiveBlog, and download our official VP Debate Drinking Game.

More »

Shared by kebernet
*giggle* Clif:

Using this standard, you might say that Sarah is “progressive” because she’s opposed to shooting gays from airplanes.

As far as I know, Palin has yet to issue a definitive position on whether she's for or against shooting gays from airplanes. She'll get back to us.

*giggle*

On the overcrowded World Wide Web, there's no greater compliment for a site than "incredibly useful and interesting," especially coming from a respected technology magazine. And that's exactly what PC World just said about OpenSecrets.org, which it named one of the Web's top 100 useful and interesting sites and one of five sites that will "boost your political awareness." We also got some love this week from the D.C. edition of Daily Candy, the trend-spotting website and e-list. Defining the word "candidiot" as one who does not read up on the candidates before voting, DC DC recommended OpenSecrets.org for getting up to speed before Nov. 4. We concur.

 

Want to see other awards and accolades that have been bestowed on OpenSecrets.org and the Center for Responsive Politics? Check these out.

The assault on CAPTCHAs continues unabated, with new evidence that Windows Live Hotmail is vulnerable to farmer-assisted support. Keeping the CAPTCHA bots out is easy—it's keeping humans out that's troublesome.

Read More...

jhruska@arstechnica.com (Joel Hruska)

In a classic episode of "The Simpsons," Lisa is forced to ask Mr. Burns a scripted question about his gubernatorial campaign. Lisa says, "Mr. Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?"

I expected ol' Hugh to ask Palin the same question. He might have, if he'd been given more time.

This morning on Fox News, Sen. John McCain tried to slam Sen. Joe Biden by saying at least Gov. Sarah Palin knows President Franklin Roosevelt "didn't talk to the American people over television."

While Biden wrongly said last week that FDR addressed the American people on television after the 1929 stock market crash, McCain is wrong that FDR didn't talk to the American people over television.

Roosevelt was the first president to appear on television when he spoke at the opening session of the New York World's Fair on April 30, 1939. The first presidential address from the White House was by President Harry Truman on Oct. 5, 1947.

(author unknown)

Last week some Sun engineers and I invited our colleagues over to Sun Santa Clara to talk about the future of VMs and languages. We called the meeting the JVM Language Summit. It was a blast; I’d like to tell you why, and what I learned.

Pizza with extra MOP

I’ll give the technical bits first, then some non-technical comments.

Here are my top-level takeaways:

• The invokedynamic design is sound, but the exposition needs more work.
• The synergy of JSR 292 with Attila Szegedi’s MOP looks very promising.
• Interface injection is going to be helpful to a lot of people, and it is not hard to implement (on top of method handles).
• Tailcall and value types will never go away. We have to plan for them.
• Unless we do this sort of innovation on the JVM, crucial multicore research will move elsewhere.
• We have to do this again next year.

The JVM change laundry list We encouraged the speakers to talk about future directions, especially at the interface between VM and language runtime. We JVM people wanted to hear the “pain points” of the language people. There was a lot to hear!

If you have read the proposed JVM changes in my blog, you know I went primed to hear certain requests for JVM changes. Unsurprisingly, I heard them. Here is my take on what people said about JVM futures, both expected and unexpected...

• too many little classes — Iulian Dragos complained of a “class explosion” from closure creation in Scala, leading to slow startups. Paul Phillips notes that the Scala compiler creates dozens of tiny classes for every “real” source class. Charlie Nutter has spent lots of time working around the problem of adapter generation. Both Paul and Charlie asked for a better way to package such auxiliary classes, in some sort of multi-class file format. An especially annoying problem, faced when dynamic languages call Java APIs, is the choice between slow reflection and fast Java method invokers, where the latter require too many little invoker classes. Method handles should help with most of these concerns; Charlie has found they tend to make his workarounds go away. Similarly, Rob Nicholson expects to use JSR 292 features to simplify library and method calls in PHP. (I hope the JVM can also adopt a multi-class package format, some day soon.)
• new method linkage or dispatch — The purpose of invokedynamic is to build compact, optimizable call sites with programmer-defined semantics. There were a number of places where this might be useful. Fortress has to support dynamic multiple (multi-argument) dispatch. Chris Dutchyn, on the other hand, argued that it was a mistake in Java’s design not to perform overload resolution at runtime; he exhibited a modified JVM that rectifies original design flaw. More conservatively, Attila Szegedi showed how his metaobject protocol (MOP) can supply dynamic overload resolution logic on top of the existing JVM; combining that with invokedynamic and Dutchyn’s algorithm might be the best way for dynamic languages to acces Java APIs.
• tagged primitives (aka fixnums) — A number of languages are noticing that their numeric (or character) operations cannot always be optimized down to primitives, and some point out that tagged references can help remove the allocations and indirections required by boxed numbers. Rich Hickey asked for fixnums for Clojure. Cliff Click studied integer loops in several languages, and found excessive boxing in Jython and Rhino (JavaScript); he reports that escape analysis might help, but notes that the complexity of Integer.valueOf caching impedes the optimizer. Real fixnums would be a robust fix to this problem, since they would make Integer.valueOf trivial. Unfortunately, they also complicate paths in nearly every module of the JVM.
• guaranteed tail call optimization — Tail calls on the JVM are an old wish, back to the early days of Java (e.g., with Kawa Scheme). Doing this right is not easy and seemingly never urgent, so the JVM has not yet supported this. Requestors included Clojure, Scala, and Fortress. Along with continuations, tail calls are a key checkoff item in order for the functional community to become more interested in the JVM. (Immutable data structures apepars to be a third key item; Rich Hickey is providing good leadership on that front.)
• interface injection — There was a lot of talk about interface injection; it seemed to be a significant new degree of freedom for many of the language implementors. David Chase mentioned it in his Fortress slides, and there was a breakout session to discuss it. I got excited enough to start cutting code for it...
• continuations — Fortress has challenges with work-stealing deadlocks that arise between callers and callees in the same thread. Introspective continuations may give some extra traction on such problems. Functional programming languages usually claim want continuations, though they often make do with weakened substitutes. I think the best use case for large-scale continuations on the JVM is self-reorganizing threads; small-scale continuation-like structures might also be the right way to make coroutines (generators, fibers, etc.).
• interpreter vs. bytecodes — Most high-level languages (e.g., JRuby, Jython, Fortress) start out running on some sort of AST interpreter. As they mature, and as they aspire to better performance, implementors start to think about byte-compiling them. At this point, the flexibility and compactness of invokedynamic should be a big help. By the way, Scala cuts across this trend, by decompiling library bytecodes up into ICode (their IR), to assist with non-local optimization.
• byte compiler vs. JIT — JRuby does delayed byte-compilation, playing the same games as HotSpot, except on the virtual metal. They have noticed that this sometimes confuses the JVM JIT, which assumes that an application’s bytecode working set is stable. Jython would also benefit from a way to deoptimize from fast bytecodes back to a more flexible (but slower) prior representation, in which stack frames are fully reified. Doing this gracefully is an open problem.
• naked native methods — JRuby needs Posix calls; the Java APIs do not supply many of them (a “glaring” flaw). The right answer is probably not to wrap all the missing Posix calls in Java, but rather to build a lower-level native call facility into the JVM.
• strange arrays — Clojure has some wonderful functional-style collection data types which could be tuned even more if the JVM offered invariant arrays, arrays with program-defined header fields, or arrays of tuples. Fortress (see a pattern?) made a request for arrays of value types.
• a fast numeric tower — The Java world needs a flexible, performance-tuned numeric tower implementation. (Clojure mentioned this as a pain point; presumably the other Lisps could us it also.) Kawa, which is admirably factored software, has such a thing. Probably the right way to present it now is via a MOP and invokedynamic, which would allow maximum flexbility and optimizability. Brian Goetz points out that this might also need value types to get right, so a number can live in two registers (the fast version and the slow version, like Rhino does). Note that arithmetic is a poster child for optimized dynamic multiple dispatch. Cliff’s talk noted that the JIT code for Clojure (while generally good) suffered from overflow checks; this sort of thing has to play well with the JIT, which means the JVM manufacturers should way attention to optimizing the library—when we build it.
• miscellaneous, persistent ideas — Fortress could also use floating point operations with the full panoply of rounding modes, and a way to profile subprograms (e.g., to pick the fastest). Clojure asked for a Rational type.

JVM earthquakes Some ideas promised to stretch the fundamentals of the JVM in unpredictable ways. Stress on Java’s heap model include immutability, transactions, and reified types. Fortress wants transactions; it is hard to say how to mix this uniformly into the heap. They are also worried about the problem of “double tagging” objects with both a JVM-level erased type and their own types. (BTW, there were some favorable comments, from those who had worked with both JVM and CLR, about the simplicity of working with the JVM’s erased types, as opposed to the unerased type parameters of CLR, which tend to get in the way of dynamic language code generation.) Finally, Erik Meijer challenged us to design systems which abstract over (and thus isolate) all side effects, including seemingly innocent ones like cloning an object.

Threads are also stressed by the new languages. In Fortress, they do not always mix smoothly with workstealing parallelism or with coroutines required by complex comprehensions. Ideally, there should be a way to break a computation into “fibers” which can be created and completed in a few instructions. Parrot (a continuation-based VM) may be able to offer insight into this. Clojure offers a concept of agent which clearly maps to JVM threads, but may require something finer if it is to scale well.

Neal Gafter explained how, as the JVM supports new languages, the Java APIs risk behind left behind on the wrong side of a semantic gap, between Java (circa 1997) and the consensus features of the new languages, all of which include some sort of lambda expressions (closures). They also often include richer dynamic dispatch, proper tail calls, exotic identifiers, and continuations. This could be a stressful change, if it requires significant retrofitting of Java APIs. We can do this: A similar stressful change was the retrofitting of the standard Java libraries to generics, and I think that worked out smoothly enough.

We (in the Da Vinci Machine project incubator) are working on some of the technically more difficult JVM changes, including tail calls, continuations, and extended arrays. As noted above, fixnums also look technically difficult, because they touch just about every corner of the JVM, so (as far as I know) nobody is looking at them. Some changes that look difficult today may turn out to be practical, once somebody has applied enough thought and experimentation. JSR 292 Naturally, I heard (and was responsible for) lots of talk about the JSR 292 effort, invokedynamic, and other Da Vinci Machine subprojects. One breakout session was titled “Invokedyamnic — the details”. Here's a picture of our confabulation:

The tale of invokedynamic

From left to right are yours truly, Jochen Theodorou (Groovy), Rob Nicholson (Project Zero PHP), Tom Enebo and Charlie Nutter (both of JRuby), Fredrik Öhrström (JRockit), Rémi Forax (JSR 292 backport), and Attila Szegedi. And here are Rémi and Jochen writing up method call scenarios:

Parallel call site examples

One of the more useful hints I got from the meetup was about the pitfalls of expressing invokedynamic as just another sort of interface invocation. (We do this to avoid breaking static analysis tools, and because invokeinterface has a four-byte operand field, not because invokedynamic and invokeinterface have similar semantics.) The exposition of the JSR 292 Early Draft needs to be adjusted to make it clear that invokedynamic has no predefined receiver, that all stacked arguments are treated equally. Thanks, Fredrik.

It seems clear that, as the invokeinterface encoding is a workaround for static tools, that when in the future we do a separately motivated verifier-breaking change (say, for tailcalls or tuples), it will be wise to revisit the encoding of invokedynamic. I suppose we will want to adopt the unused invoke bytecode for a clean, receiverless invokedynamic, and deprecate the old compatible encoding. But not until we have enough changes planned to warrant a verifier-breaking change. And even now, it seems right to express dynamic calls in pseudo-Java using static syntax: Dynamic.greet("hello", "world", 123); // => ldc "hello"; ldc "world"; ldc 123; // invokeinterface Dynamic.greet(String,int)Object

Finally, it was really good to stand up and defend (and debug) the design in front of the people who will be using it. It got chewed on for a good long while...

Whiteboard aftermath So, how did it all go? Overall, people seemed very happy with the Summit. I know I was.

• Our goal was to fill Sun’s largest classroom (90 seats) with engineers and researchers.
  Result: There were about 75 registered attendees, rounded out by a number of local Sun engineers attending part time.
• Since it needed to be a small meeting, we wanted a true summit, of lead designers and implementors working on JVM languages and related technologies.
  Result: Wonderfully, our visitors were a who’s–who in that world, including two out of three original Java Language Spec. authors, JVM team members from Sun (HotSpot, Maxine, Monty), IBM (J9), Oracle (JRockit), and Azul, senior CLR designers, and key engineers from an astonishing variety of JVM languages. We even saw a Parrot.
• We wanted lots of conversation, for the designers learn from each other and tune up their plans for the future.
  Result: Except during the talks, the classroom (plus all available breakout spaces) was full of the buzz of intense technical conversations. Many people stayed late trying to finish the last chat, even after the food was gone and it was time to go home. On the comment cards, the highest score (4.9 out of 5) went to the category “quality of conversations you had”.
• We wanted to be good hosts, and didn’t want logistics to get in the way of the conversation.
  Result: For a conference organized solely by engineers, it was pretty good, and we think we can make it better next time. Actually, we had the good fortune of enlisting a project manager, who helped us keep our actions coherent. (Thanks, Penni!) The comment cards were both encouraging (4.4 out of 5, our lowest category) and helpful in detail.
• We wanted to capture much of the discourse, so that more people could share in the talks than would fit in the Sun classroom.
  Result: Most of the slides, as well as interesting extra information, is captured as informal proceedings in the Summit wiki. Have a look! (I did learn that wiki is a reasonable way to assemble a conference proceeding, but a bad medium for interaction. Note that all the Talk pages are empty, and the OpenSpaces organization moved onto a physical bulletin board.)

Best of all, InfoQ.com has professionally recorded the prepared talks, and has promised to put all of them up on the web, some nicely edited with slides, and other posted as raw video. We will have to wait for this, though. (Ask them when!)

P.S. Thanks, Oleg Pliss, for the great pictures! (The not-great ones are frames from my video camera.)

Laptop – 1, Rose & Goetz – 0

As mentioned earlier, a good friend (Miller) and I took a vacation to Oktoberfest last week. The flight over was brutal: Denver -> Newark (4 hour layover) -> Paris (2 hour layover) -> Munich. I was pretty disappointed to see "No Service" on my iPhone when we landed in France. This continued in Munich and I quickly decided connectivity wasn't necessary. After a 80 € cab ride from the airport, we arrived at our hotel around 1PM on Monday. We both woke up at 4AM on Sunday to start the journey, so we were pretty beat.

It didn't take us long to decide we had to suck it up and head to "The Tents" at Oktoberfest. We walked the 4 blocks in the rain and quickly ended up in the Armbrustschutzenzelt tent. The crowd was small and we found a table and enjoyed our first Liter.

I won't go into details about how much fun we had during the week, except for these simple stats:

• Made it into The Tents 5 days in a row
• Mostly slept in until 2 or 4PM each day
• No Hangovers (for me at least)

I've uploaded most of the pictures I took to an Oktoberfest 2008 set on Flickr. I would like to thank Peter and friends for being fabulous hosts and showing us a great time on Thursday night. Below is a video I took of what the festivities were like (yes, that is Bon Jovi):

If you ever get a chance to attend Oktoberfest, I highly recommend it.

Matt Raible

Congress has balked at the Bush administration's proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Under this plan, the Treasury would have bought the "troubled assets" of financial institutions in an attempt to avoid economic meltdown.

GIMP 2.6 has been officially released. The new version is the first to include the Generic Graphics Library, a powerful graph-based image editing framework that enables the GIMP to support higher color depth. This takes the open source graphics program one step closer to being ready for the professional graphics market.

Read More...

segphault@arstechnica.com (Ryan Paul)

Wingnut—Bush deniers will never learn….

Of course, everything is political - so if you google the article, high on the list you find this delightful screed from Powerline, which says that I was just looking for something to complain about amidst the Bush Boom, and concludes:

[T]here is little reason to fear a catastrophic collapse in home prices.
Krugman will have to come up with something much better, I think, to cause many others to share his pessimism.

Memories, memories.

 John Hinderaker is always wrong….(h/t Atrios)

Have you noticed that every person suddenly knows everything there is to know about how the economy works?  Wow, it’s all so simple. Activists now know all there is about the dollar and oil prices and mortgages. I wonder why they never chimed in before…I started asking people for their stock tips since they are all experts now. We will all get rich quick. Right?

(updated below - Update II)

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein has spent the week insisting that only gross ignorance could account for opposition to the Paulson bailout. After the House rejected the bailout plan on Monday, he wrote a column -- entitled "They Just Don't Get It" -- arguing that bailout opponents simply "don't understand the seriousness of the situation." He scoffed at the idea that any well-informed person could question -- let alone oppose -- the specific Paulson bailout plan Steve Pearlstein favors.

Today, in a chat Pearlstein had with readers, one reader voiced extremely reasonable and well-informed objections to this specific bailout plan:You are correct in your piece yesterday that 'we don't get it'. I don't get the fact that millions of admittedly reckless homeowners are losing their homes but we only worry about bailing out big banks. . . . Well, I don't have confidence in the people who authored this 'bailout' and give them absolutely zero credit for the job they have done so far. I ask again what I asked you last week: Why not buy out the bad mortgages of the 'subprime' borrowers? The lenders will get their money and the government might get its money back in the future. Why not bail up instead of bail down?Pearlstein responded by boasting that he had won the Pulitzer Prize:Nobody has been more critical of the practices of banks and Wall Street and brokers than I have, probably long before you were even focused on this issue, so I certainly don't owe you any apology on that one. If you want to check, you'll see I won a certain prize for that.Another reader then objected: "No, Mr. Pearlstein, it's you who doesn't get it. . . .Bail out the people who need -- and deserve -- our help keeping up the payments on their homes. If we do that, Wall Street's bad mortgage debt will take care of itself." That prompted this outburst from Pearlstein:The left wing bloggers are out in force on this one -- they see this as a seminal issue, like the Iraq war vote and the vote on warrantless searches. But other than not really understanding the problem and not really having studied the proposal, you guys are doing just great! Thank God there is a mainstream media out there that actually does reporting and has people who understand thing [sic], because if the flow of information and news to the American people were left solely to bloggers, we'd be in a big mess.Where to begin? Oh how we long for the Glory Days when the Steve Pearlsteins had their Supreme Wisdom honored and never had to hear anyone talking back:

First, an enormous number of Actual Economists -- as opposed to newspaper columnists -- vigorously oppose the bailout. Professor Nouriel Roubini called it a "disgrace" and has repeatedly argued it will not alleviate the crisis: "the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown."

Second, all sorts of other Actual Experts -- not just Pearlstein's idiot-readers and moron-left-wing-bloggers who have the audacity to object -- have argued that this plan won't work, is deeply unjust, and that far better and more equitable alternatives exist.

Just today, in Pearlstein's own paper, Jonathan G.S. Koppell and William N. Goetzmann of the Yale School of Management argued that a far preferable solution is to have the government pay off all delinquent mortgages -- which would transform the toxic waste into solid instruments and would prevent people from having their homes foreclosed -- the very plan Pearlstein's reader advocated which provoked such snotty scorn. Many other ignorant, ill-informed morons have had the temerity to argue that other proposals were superior to the bailout, including George Soros (recapitalize the banking system) and Actual Economist Brad DeLong (nationalize under-capitalized institutions). One of the leading blogger-opponents of the bailout has been Duncan Black, an Actual Economist with a Ph.D. in Economics from Brown. And Actual Economist Dean Baker wrote earlier this week:How do we go about getting the banks in order? Almost every economist I know rejects the Paulson approach and argues instead for directly injecting capital into the banks. The taxpayers give them the money and then we own some, or all, of the bank. (That's what Warren Buffet did with Goldman Sachs.)Pearlstein -- and so many other bailout cheerleaders -- scorns those same concerns as grounded in stupidity and ignorance when they come from the ugly, loudmouth, teeming, insubordinate masses who refuse to obediently bear the massive debt being tossed on their backs.

Third, just today I interviewed former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston -- who, unlike Pearlstein, didn't beat his chest and boast that he "won a certain prize" for his journalism, though he did -- and Johnston condemned what he called the "atrocious" journalism on the financial crisis, and said "there's an enormous amount of just wrong reporting going on." In particular, Johnston documented the fear-mongering taking place among TV journalists that has plainly put the public into the state of submissive panic that Pearlstein wants them to be in, whereby -- exactly as was true for Iraq, eavesdropping, the Patriot Act and a whole host of other measures -- they come to be convinced that they better unquestioningly and immediately submit to the dictates of the political and media establishment, they better relinquish any belief that they should question what they're being told, lest they suffer imminent, inevitable, catastrophic doom.

Fourth, nothing is easier and cheaper -- or more worthless -- than making sweeping, categorical criticisms of large groups without bothering to identify a single specific. Who specifically are the "left-wing bloggers" spouting ill-informed and misleading statements in opposition to the bailout? Specifically, what have they said that isn't true, and which "mainstream media" reporters have "actually do[ne] reporting" and "understand things" and thus saved the country from being misled by the blogging-morons who dare to oppose the bailout?

Fifth, Pearlstein snidely dismisses concerns that the Treasury Secretary about to be vested with vast discretion can't be trusted with such power ("in the list of villains, [Paulson]'s pretty low on the list," and "I think you may want to think again before questioning his motives or his competence"). Pearlstein specifically mocked the idea that Paulson is motivated by allegiance to his until-very-recently Wall St. friends and Goldman colleagues ("He let Lehman fail, and that nearly brought Goldman down with it, which doesn't sound like a guy who was out primarily to protect his Wall Street friends").

But it's Pearlstein who appears quite ignorant here. As Johnston pointed out, letting Lehman fail eliminated a Goldman competitor, while Paulson's decision to save AIG -- in debt to Goldman for $20 billion -- likely saved Goldman. The fact that Paulson's decision to save AIG was made in consultation with Goldman's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, raises obvious, pressing questions for anyone who is not a blindly gullible establishment-worshiper. As Actual Economist Dean Baker said about that episode:Did Goldman's influence with their ex-CEO make a difference in Paulson's decision? I have no idea, but this thing stinks. Can you imagine if clerical workers losing their homes got to sit around with bankruptcy judges deciding the fate of their mortgages? It doesn't work that way where the rest of us live.

It is impossible to exaggerate the corruption of this Wall Street crowd.And then there is the fact that Paulson was leading Goldman when it was a leader in the very reckless derivatives wreaking such havoc, and it was Paulson who continuously insisted for the last two years that there was no housing crisis and that the market was correcting itself. The deep public distrust of our Government and the establishment which Pearlstein serves is profoundly rational and well-informed. It is the blind trust Pearlstein is eager to vest that is ignorant.

Contrary to Pearlstein's simplistic bullying, opposition to the bailout isn't tantamount to denial that there is a financial crisis. It's perfectly possible simultaneously to recognize that we have a serious crisis in the credit market and still oppose the bailout. It's also possible to acknowledge a crisis in the credit market while questioning whether a rejection of this specific plan would spawn a global meltdown and catapult us into the Second Great Depression.

From the beginning, Congress considered only one framework -- the Paulson framework -- and systematically ignored all others. Professor Roubini called that decision "pathetic" precisely because it resulted in consideration of one plainly inferior plan. Professor Roubini is right, and it's equally pathetic to watch people like Pearlstein try to shove this bailout down the public's throat based on patronizing claims that these matters are much too complex for regular people to have an opinion (even if the opinion is based on familiarity with what actual experts have been arguing) and that, instead, the only rational thing to do is cede one's critical faculties to those with regular columns at The Washington Post (ones who have won "certain prizes" for that). That sort of blind following of our Nation's Wise Men is what the country has been doing for the last eight years. The only thing that's "ignorant" would be continuing to do it.

UPDATE: Former Bush Treasury Secretary and long-time Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill has obviously been reading way too many stupid left-wing blogs and not nearly enough intrepid Washington Post columnists (h/t karrsic):Paul O'Neill, who served as President Bush's first treasury secretary, today called the bailout bill headed for Senate passage "crazy," with "unbelievably bad" consequences.

"Doesn't this seem like lunacy to you?," said O'Neill, who was President Bush's first Treasury chief, from 2001 to 2002, in a telephone interview today. "The consequences of it are unbelievably bad in terms of public intrusion into the private sector."

"Is anybody thinking there?" asked O'Neill, who also served as deputy budget director in the Ford administration. "It's too late, it's not going to make any difference and it's aggravating as hell when there's a better idea and you can't even get it in play," he said, recognizing little success so far in pitching his own proposal.Did Steve Pearlstein mention that he won the Pulitzer Prize?

UPDATE II: Another drooling know-nothing being misled by left-wing bloggers is John Allison -- CEO of BB&T, one of America's largest commercial banks (h/t nick):BB&T chief exec slams bailout plan

A significant and immediate tax credit for financial institutions to purchase homes would be a more effective solution for the financial crisis than the proposed $700 billion federal bailout, says BB&T Chief Executive John Allison. . . .

He adds the primary beneficiaries of the proposed rescue are The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS). The U.S. Treasury, he says, is "totally dominated by Wall Street investment bankers," and "cannot be relied on to objectively assess all the implications of government policy on all financial intermediaries."

Allison also said it is "inappropriate that the debate is largely being shaped by the financial institutions who made very poor decisions."Allison -- drowning in populist rhetoric, class-war resentment, and paranoid questioning of the motives of government officials -- obviously "doesn't get" just how serious of a financial crisis we face.

Glenn Greenwald

Exhibit A:
Shepard Fairey



Exhibit B:
Official Denver Police Union
Democratic National Convention
Commemorative T-Shirt

jwz@jwz.org

I recently talked with Sun’s Jacob Lehrbaum. We start out discussing the larger context that RIA technologies are finding themselves in and then narrow down to JavaFX in particular. On that topic I ask Jacob to clear up the what and how questions around JavaFX and open source, we discuss how the JavaFX Preview release has been going.(author unknown)

Shared by kebernet
Exceptions being Herbert, Orwell, and Carroll. Exceptions being Herbert, Orwell, and Carroll.

The nondisclosure agreement attached to Apple's iPhone SDK has finally been lifted. Now developers can freely discuss nonbeta versions of the SDK, which will surely result in an explosion of publicly available hints, tips and programming discussion.

Read More...

chris.foresman@arstechnica.com (Chris Foresman)