Linux and the software available for it has finally reached the point for me that I can use it on my daily-use hardware. There is nothing I want to do that cannot be done under Linux now, GIMP be damned.

Mint with Cinnamon is a damn fine usable OS.

Windows 8 and it's tablet-wannabe interface will forever remain a distant nightmare of 'What might have been'.

I guess my warped way of thinking just can't embrace the notion of supporting a political party. I understand the need for governance of some kind to maintain social order, I understand being conservative in your views, or liberal, but I question the whole concept of being part of a political organization when so many members of that party are so manifestly corrupt, morally subversive or just plain vile. Why would you want to be part of anything that has even a little bit of rot in it?

from James Killough's excellent article 'Do Republicans Dream of Electric Elephants':

http://purefilmcreative.com/killough-chronicles/do-republicans-dream-of-electric-sheep.html

My cats have great skill at destroying keyboards. Whether it's lodging just the right amount of fur under the right Shift key, standing in just the right spot to crack the PCB under the membrane, or nudging the cup I'm drinking out of until it spills right onto the all-important WASD keys, they manage it about once every 6-7 months.

I'd love to get one of those mechanical switch jobbies for the nice tactile clickie feel, since I'm a fast touch-typist, but I can't help but think that they'd be even more cat-prone than membrane keyboards.

For the time being, Logitech makes a nice basic membrane-style keyboard, the k120 that retails for around $15. It's fairly spill resistant, can keep up with my typing, and is fairly easy to clean. Then, when it meets its end in the cruel feline paws of fate several months down the road, I don't feel so bad dropping another $15.

So back during the SOPA thing, I had a lot of real life matters going on that were somewhat more important than taking time to look for a new DNS and webhost. I contented myself with taking the ten minutes necessary for writing a nasty letter, got on with my pressing business, and SOPA died... for the time being.

Now, I happen to have a few spare moments to dedicate to looking for a new webhost, and Anonymous or AnonymousOwner or whoever has done me a favor by reminding me that Godaddy is not necessarily my friend.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd prefer somewhere that supports, or would let me install Ruby and Rails 3. Heroku seems to be the default Rails hangout, but frankly their pricing confuses the hell out of me.

My understanding is that, propagandist or no, Rasmussen leans heavily republican simply by their methodology.. ie, the way they do their polling means they skew their samples.

Electoral-Vote.com has a model that shows projection data with or without Rasmussen data included. According to their model, Obama will win in November either way, but a few more senate races will go Democrat rather than Republican if you exclude Rasmussen polling data.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2012/Pres/Maps/Sep08-noras.html

Ironic captcha: Freeing. *sigh*. If only there was a candidate I could vote for who would really do that.

When I saw the question, my first thought was 'Back from the Dead machine! If I could bring back anyone...' which was immediately countered by 'No, no, no... A CLONING machine, moron.' Any clone I made would biologically be the identical twin of the person or animal I chose to clone, but would not be that same person. Their experiences and environmental factors would be wildly different.

Now, with that in mind, I began thinking about 'Well, who would I like to spend time with that I can't?'

I thought of my beloved tabby cat, who lived to be 15. I would enjoy spending another 15 years with an almost identical kitty, but I already have two younger cats I love dearly. I'd get more out of my time spending time with those guys.

My spouse? Why on earth would I want more than one? She's the jealous type and I'm not interested in any kind of polygamy or polyamory.

But we are childless. The opportunity to raise my spouse's identical twin as our child is actually quite attractive. I know that I'm compatible emotionally with my spouse, so the idea of raising a child guaranteed to be very similar to her is very interesting. If I had to chose, I think I'd go that route.

But, of course there *are* serious ethical issues. It's fun to think about, though.

you had me until you used the words "paradigm shift". ugh.

And it felt bad typing them. I asked myself, 'really, self? 'Paradigm shift?' WTF?'

But the words are used correctly in the sense that the paradigm of personal computing is shifting away from natively compiled applications running on desktop and laptop appliances to scripted applications running on handheld devices.

So I kept it.

Another strangely apropos paradigm shift... er... captcha: horrify

Of course there are many, many factors leading to the downfall of Microsoft. We've been reading about them for years as the 800 Pound Gorilla from Redmond has been slowly breaking its bones under its own weight.

Most people will point to the fact that Microsoft's failures have ensured that more people are using Linux worldwide than ever before... in the form of Android smartphones. MS *could* have had that market, but they continued to present shit products in the face of (at least perceived) quality goods from Apple and Google.

We've also heard in the last few days and weeks about how serious Valve is about getting their products to be 'Native' for Linux. We're going to see more of that, especially as more and more game designers want to develop for smart-phones.

Going forward, Microsoft's plans for smartphone development look pretty dismal. They're not even supporting their own technologies or frameworks, like Silverlight.

Ultimately, however, I think that shipping an WindowsME-bad desktop OS while this massive paradigm shift is happening is going to have long-reaching and long-lasting effects. Unlike when WinME shipped, there are some pretty darn good alternatives for development on both phones and PCs right now. When Win8 starts flopping around like a hooked carp, it's not going to be just the developers looking for an exit. It's going to be gamers and home-users as well. This time that exit is pretty darn visible.

And today is the day that flopping carp was hooked.

Captcha: resisted. How oddly apropos...

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The 'pay as you go' is the important part.

Virgin Mobile is actually what I use for cell service, simply because Pay-as-you-go service nicely prevents any overcharge hijinks.

Choosing between Verizon, Sprint, and ATT is like choosing between Joe Jackson, Ike Turner, and O.J. Simpson.

Virgin Mobile is like Bobby Brown, holding to the terribly flawed analogy. You're gonna regret hooking up, but at least you can get away from it if you're not on crack.

Wait... You're leaving Verizon because they've treated you like complete crap and are going to either Sprint or ATT?

I mean, let's completely ignore for the moment how Apple treats their customers. Sprint or ATT? You SERIOUSLY think either of these guys will treat you better than Verizon?

...asphyxiating in the cold reaches of interstellar space?

Money well spent.

I hope that in centuries to come, our descendants will look back on copyright and 'intellecutal property' as a stupid little social experiment that became a painful learning experience.

'Man, I'm glad we don't to go through that crap. Can you believe they had to PAY for data?!'

For that matter where are the canned sites in Perl or Ruby or whatever?

http://rubyonrails.org/ IS the canned site in Ruby.

The problem is that while Ruby is a nice, reasonable language that's pleasant for both new coders and experienced coders, Rails has its very own learning curve on top of that. One need learn Rails configuration options, its database abstraction layer, the ins and out of Rails itself, and the ins and outs of a double-handful of 'gems' (read: 'plugins') for commonly used website features like authentication.

Now all that said, it's not a fun learning curve, but it's not exactly brutal, either. Once you get that mess down, you can 'throw up' a website in minutes... ...assuming you can find a webhost that supports rails.

I've always thought the 'Gingers have no souls' bit was invented totally by Matt Stone, a Jewish/Irish/American ginger, for 'South Park' as a 'take that' for Jewish critics of the show who describe him as a 'Self-hating Jew'.

I've always thought that Ginger skin-tone and hair coloration was very attractive on women. I've not heard a lot of disrespect for Gingers before the South Park episode, and then it's been entirely tongue-in-cheek.

- Appreciating data-types, their limitations and the perils of using casting them incorrectly helped me a lot in understanding about things I need to be careful about

This is a fairly serious issue, but one that can be brought up after the basics of computer programming have been instilled. Most languages are either loosely typed, duck-typed, or have robust conversion features these days. Kids who learn to mangle a string in Javascript will pick up quickly on 'You have to use a 'to_str' method in some other languages'.

The place where this will really catch them is math... but again there are robust solutions in almost all languages.

- Are they going skip the concept of Pointers ? It's not wise to use them unless necessary but to be aware of the concept was very rewarding for me

Pointers in anything other than the very lowest-level-touching-the-metal code are an abomination. They cause far more confusion and grief than they ever help. Yes, there are situations in which the best way to address a problem is to pass a pointer around. However, in this day and age of multi-gigabyte ram sticks, I'd rather bloat up a program's ram usage with maybe unnecessary copies of large objects than dick around with pointers.

- How will they teach multi-threaded programming? We're not quite there yet in JS.

Threading and thread safety are not really beginner concepts, nor are they really required for the majority of code work in the real world.

However, JS approaches the issue obliquely by being bolted onto the threading model of the underlying interpreter. In a browser, which is probably what most of these kids will be learning on, you have to worry about concurrency of the browser instance. If I run a script in this named window, is it going to affect anything in that named window? No, that's not really threading, but it's the same mental concept.

Likewise, beginners are not going to be writing their own output handlers, which is the obvious usage for threading. The advanced ones are going to be playing with painting on HTML5 canvas elements while maybe playing sounds at the same time. They'll be using the browser's already threaded output for those functions.