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Comment Re:Not much (Score 1) 385

They basically just held up the Senate for 10 hours knowing full well that nothing concrete was being accomplished.

Now those are public servants--regardless of what legislation they delayed!

A Pity. Encasing the whole lot of them in concrete would probably be one of the best things that ever happened to US Government.

Comment Re:Effect? (Score 2) 385

For those kool-ade drinkers defending the administration regarding domestic spying, do you want your political enemies to have this power to wield when they inevitably gain office?

And don't forget - a lot of this stuff was given to the current administration by THEIR political enemies (the previous administration).

I think that this makes a very good case for concluding that there is no intelligent life in Washington.

Comment Re:At the companies I've worked with... (Score 2) 271

I still use Perl when I have something that's heavily regex-based.

Python's better for when you need something that's readable afterwards and/or leverages a lot of pre-written code.

Python's equivalent of CPAN provides code that's a lot less fragile than what comes out of CPAN. Probably because it's not having to run a lot of stuff through a C compiler.

Comment Re:Only Two Futures? (Score 1) 609

No. I don't mean civil crimes. Nixon wasn't the first to abuse power, but he got slapped down and took his lumps gracefully. He didn't have a whole lot of scruples when it came to power, but he didn't spend every waking moment working on ways to utterly destroy everything the Democratic Party was trying to do regardless of merit.

It wasn't until Reagan's cronies took over that "compromise" became a 4-letter word.

Comment Re:So, when has this not been true? (Score 1) 609

I presume that you've been missing all the census reports for the last several decades that indicate that the American populace has been getting progressively less white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant and (percentage-wise) more Latino/Black/Asian, Catholic/Muslim/Hindu/miscellaneous and so forth? To the point that "white folks" are now themselves becoming a minority?

In ice-cream terms, What was once Vanilla with a few specks in it is becoming more like Rocky Road or something.

This isn't a "kids" these days thing. The "kids" aren't "our kids" anymore. That's the difference.

Comment Re:So, when has this not been true? (Score 3, Insightful) 609

The conventional wisdom was that in your youth, you were a liberal and as you "wised up" (grew older/more cynical) you became conservative.

The joker in the deck was that presently the younger generation is less vanilla than the older generation and the older generation isn't being very welcoming to people who aren't like them and never will be. So what used to be a pipeline from Democrat to Republican has developed a blockage and a lot of people are being squeezed out of the party pipes entirely.

Comment Re:Only Two Futures? (Score 5, Insightful) 609

I'd become a REPUBLICAN if the Republican party were anything like it was in the JFK years. There were Hawks and there were Doves, but they weren't exclusively in one party or the other, and outside of their opposing views on war and expansionism, they could be civil to each other. It was only the Cold War and Nuclear Armageddon, not like the very foundations of the Universe were at stake.

Now everything's a pledge and a "litmus test" and the loonies run the asylum.

Comment Re:Triticum aestivum spelta (Score 2) 333

The last time I saw the word "smelt" outside of metallurgy was in The Hobbit.

The English language has been losing its grammatical nuances for a long time, which is why we don't wear shoon on our feet anymore. Although I suspect that the sheer weight of so many non-native English speakers participating these days has had an accelerating effect.

Britain will just have to console itself with the fact that Americans are giving up on "gray" in favor of "gree", I mean, "grey".

But that's a horse of another colour.

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