I wrote in a post here today:

I'm not about to say that capitalism is moral. I'm just saying it's more moral (or less immoral, for those who want it worded that way instead) than the alternative. I know that sounds lame in the sense that ideally we'd have something that's moral, but I'm just coming at this pragmatically here.

I have to assume that part of my preference for the system of unfairness that is the free market must be due to it being the only thing I've ever known. But I think most of it is that it is almost strictly predictable in the outcomes it leads to, and that I accept those outcomes. Sort of "better the devil you know...", but not exactly.

My philosophy on wealth as far as I can remember is that you're working to attain whatever levels you might be able to in life, for greater comfort in life and access to greater luxuries. You figure out how much you want to work and how well you want to live and figure out the balance that's right for you, factoring in the kind of brains, drive, and luck that you know yourself to have.

And then be happy where you are, when you reach that. I don't begrudge the richer man for having a better car than mine, because his fate in life is not mine. I feel sorry for the poorer man, but he probably makes worse decisions in life than I do. Or at least worse from my POV.

So I guess I'm okay with the inequalities inherent in life (like brains and luck) and that are a function of what each individual chooses for himself (like drive).

And consequently what I'm not okay with is forced, collective, man-made alterations to this. For example I'm okay with a rich man offering some kid a scholarship to college and possibly thereby altering his chances of attaining a higher wealth level in life than he normally would. But I'm not okay with for example Affirmative Action.

Firstly in the alternative, it can be more chaotic, being based on man's whim, for whichever kind of men are in power in that era. Today's members of a govt. death panel may decide to favor the young, but tomorrow's may favor the old. Whereas under the profit motive, directors can come and go but the goal stays the same. Profit is a uniting goal and one that's orthogonal to differences in politics/religion.

Secondly, but BD you may say, for now and the foreseeable future a federal govt. run anything will be entirely predictable; predictably Leftist. True in a way, and that's why it's not "...the devil that I don't know". But I also don't like many of the outcomes targeted, not to mention outcomes that I might like but never get achieved.

Capitalism has been very successful in raising standards of living. Leftism, not so much. (Granted, maybe it's in part a function of how corrupted that ism has been.)

In short, unproven political preferences has a large tinge of arbitrariness to me. And part of what's fair and right is that which you can count on.

I see someone just found my comments which were foolishly mod-bombed. They then moderated them "funny". I suspect whoever did that knew that a "funny" mod does not move karma.

What they might have not realized, though, was that the mod bomber didn't move my karma either.

If people want to waste their mod points on my comments, they can certainly do so. If they think that it will change my karma here, they are sadly mistaken.

I'm trying to make sense of the dizzying array of languages/technologies purportedly used in the customer-facing portion of the HealthCare.gov site. I understand ASP.NET, JSP, and JavaServer Faces to be web templating engines, comprising 39 files. I don't see PHP or ColdFusion listed. And there's 1635 HTML files. It doesn't seem like all of these could be just static content.

It's possible a lot of them could get their dynamic data via AJAX, and maybe that's what a lot of the XSLT is for. But I think most people these days move JSON back and forth and not XML. But in any event, how are placeholders in the HTML files getting replaced? There's only 23 files between Perl and Python, and 248 Bourne shell files, so are they using [showing my age/what little I know] SED and/or AWK to do this? Or would the .sh's be calling the Perl and Python files?

At least people are paying a little bit of attention to this case of an 18 month old boy killed by an unsecured gun. Unfortunately there is no indication that the irresponsible idiot who owned the gun will face any consequences for his stupidity.

Apparently, in Arizona, the right to carry weapons wherever one pleases is more important than the right to not be senselessly killed at a young age as a result of some shithead's inability to keep their weapon secured.

... some mod bombers never learn. To my mod bomber, just consider this. If I cared enough to report your mod-bombing, you wouldn't have mod points anymore. You might get your jollies off of seeing me mock you publicly, but you aren't accomplishing anything more than that.

Courtesy of just one slashdot conservative:

Liberals need to prove innocence when accused of wrongdoing

I was perusing the comments under the article about a new ultra-wide 3440 x1440 monitor, and this comment sparked a side thought:

This made me think, as monitors have gotten bigger, maybe a certain couple of old programming rules of thumb need to be restated, in terms of something else that is:

1) Wrap your lines of code at 80 columns, and

2) A function generally should not be more than a screenful in length.

Senate Democrats voted on a letter asking for the Washington Redskins to change their name. This is, of course, a total waste of time as the team can do whatever they want and the Senate doesn't have any way to change that.

Is this a total waste of time? Of course. Is it a bigger waste of time than launching yet another investigation into Benghazi? Not even remotely. It also costs nowhere near as much money as what republicans have already spent drumming up support for their silly witch hunt.

Hence, if the Senate Democrats want to learn how to waste American time and money on the pursuit of meaningless political points, they need to look across the hall.

Any reasonable person knows that there is no good reason from this point for the GOP to push the Benghazi conspiracy any further. They have assembled another committee in the house to investigate the attack. However, if impeachment is their goal - and it certainly appears to be - then they have basically zero chance to achieve that. The reason I say that is because the time has already run out for that to lead to a successful impeachment of President Obama before his presidency ends in 2017. There is no chance that the committee could come up with sufficient charges in time for the pre-trial and trial to happen before then.

This means that in the most favorable - by which I mean most damning possible conclusions from the house committee - situation, the GOP will still be wasting taxpayer time and money when the 2016 election happens. In the - more likely based on what previous investigations have shown - scenario where the committee does not produce something worthy of an impeachment hearing, the GOP will have to face the fact that they wasted millions (if not billions) of taxpayer dollars and a great amount of time on what is clearly a political witch hunt.

Similarly, while conservatives are almost uniformly (and mostly alone) convinced that Obama himself somehow caused the Benghazi attack (presumably as part of his NWO aspirations, by use of his time machine and weather control technology), they also seem convinced of one other thing - that Hillary Clinton will be the democratic nominee for POTUS in 2016. Frankly I am not convinced that she will win the nomination, but that is a different matter. More so I am left to wonder if the GOP fears Clinton so much that they have actually decided to throw the 2016 election in the interest of trying to start framing a better 2020 campaign now.

(Aside from the normal level of pissing me off they do every time I have to go into Word or Project.)

1) In IE 11 they got rid of the ability to quickly test your web page with js disabled, by removing that feature from the browser's developer tools window. Now you have to drill down in menus and dialogs and past confirm prompts and change it like a normal user would in the regular browser UI. Why?!?

2) In Visual Studio 2012 they got rid of the ability to record a quick macro to for example play back a series of repetitive editing tasks, by removing the entire macros feature completely. In an IDE? Are you fucking kidding me?!? Now people are saying ya gotta get Notepad++ and copy and paste into that and back. I'm not familiar with that tool, but... WHY!!!!???

3) In Security Essentials for Windows XP they've programmed it to pop up nag screens several times an hour, ever since the OS has gone out of support. It doesn't just pop up once, and its window is always on top so it can't just be ignored. There's apparently no way to disable it and still have the protection aside from installing the previous version if you happen to have a copy of it laying around. So XP is out of support, so no more patches, but why basically force people to uninstall the security suite as well? To get XP machines pwned even faster? Why?!?

In short, WhyTF actually *remove* functionality? It costs virtually nothing to just leave it there.

p.s. I'm in no hurry to upgrade my XP-based netbook, esp. sans any real carrots from MS (and I don't respond well to sticks). So I'm not sure what to do about that, except not use it for anything serious on the WWW. Accepting all serious suggestions (from those who are visible to me here, that is). I don't have a portable optical drive with it.

p.p.s. So MS knew about a remote code execution vulnerability in IE 8 for at least 6 months, and chose to do nothing about it? Hmm, and IE 8 is the latest browser you can install on XP. Ya know, it's almost like they were dropping support for XP early.

I see the "Linux Sucks" video made the front page (a few days late) here on slashdot today. Along with many others, I chimed in that the trend of videos instead of text is fucking stupid (and honestly an insult to our intelligence). I was happy to see that many others made similar complaints over the matter.

Not that I expect it to make a difference, as people still seem to get jollies posting videos of themselves saying crap on youtube regardless, but it is good to see that I'm not alone on the matter. I'm just waiting now to see if this hack is running for office and got the shitty idea that way.

So nerd Lefties are getting their panties in a bunch over Mozilla supporting DRM content.

This is because to them DRM is like so-called "closed source" software, and what Mozilla has done is gone with a permissive license model instead of the GPL.

That is, zero tolerance for that which is opposed, no matter how much that marginalizes your entrant in the market, and therefore also how much you're in a position of power to effect change, does not seem to be the path for the Firefox folks.

Maybe like MS's "embrace and extend", it's "accept until it can be changed". The question is, when is it smart to compromise principles and when isn't it. (Where by "compromising principles" I don't mean "selling out" or something unseemly like that, but just biding your time and/or choosing your battles wisely.) Especially when they're very strongly-held principles.

First a parenthetical caveat: I plan on getting the Windows 8 *Phone* OS.

I've been on the lookout for a flagship-model Nokia Windows phone. I still have a flip/dumbphone, and at least for my first smartphone I want a top-end model, to explore, until I learn what I don't need/never use. A Nokia model because I was an adv amat photog in a previous (i.e. film) era, and their emphasis caters to that interest.

And I've been on AT&T (and its prior incarnations for my area) since I got my first, mini brick phone, and the call quality has always been borderline unusable. So it's going to be a Verizon smartphone, and they got a flagship Windows Phone model, the Lumia Icon, earlier this year.

So basically I'm just waiting a little longer until Nokia's "Cyan" software update gets pushed out to people with that model, which will include the OS upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1, and then I'll give it about a month and see if people are reporting success and if there's any problems.

And then I'm just hoping it won't be for mobile what I think is happening on the desktop. And that is, MS technically supporting unpopular OS versions, but not really working at it or giving a shit.

And this is what pisses me off. I bought a new PC (because I fried my previous one, and needed one) with the much-maligned Windows Vista OS, about the time SP 2 for it was being released. So of course I didn't have any problems with it. Yes I did it because I was in a pickle, timing-wise, and had to, but still, I got Vista x64 Ultimate, their most expensive version, at a time when they were probably hurting for sales.

And what thanks do I get? A shitty patch last month that screws my whole system. Works fine on all the Windows 7 systems that I've seen. So I believe the problem is that Vista is purportedly down to less than 3% marketshare, lower than even the paltry %-age that desktop Windows 8 and 8.1 have. I believe that, like Windows XP and IE 6 before that, MS wants Vista to just go away and be a mostly-forgotten bad memory.

Great, so I bought your product in good faith, and I get short-shrift support. I wasn't one of the ones decrying the OS. So what am I supposed to do then. It looks like one can no longer get Windows 7. And I'm sure as hell not going to get Windows 8.x, since people are stupid sheep and irrationally bagging on that bigtime, so MS will probably treat it like Vista as soon as Windows 9 comes out and all the morons flip-flop their tune.

So, there is no way I would get a new Windows version until 9 comes out (some time next year, is expected). That is, unless bad luck, such as an unrecoverable bad patch, befalls me again.

Luckily this one was recoverable, barely. I.e. I was still able to log in via the admin account. And while uninstalling the update didn't do anything, rolling back to the restore point it created before installing it did the trick. But I did a lot of fretting and Google searching, with no success, and was applying last month's patches individually after rolling the whole set back, to track down which one(s) was the perpetrator. I.e. a huge PITA way of spending my time that I don't need.

As it turns out, all just to fix an issue with paths that should be unreachable if someone tricks you into running a .bat or .cmd file off the Internet. I think I'll manage without this patch. I might have to set that update "hidden" in Windows Update, to not be bugged about it every month.

Regarding this subthread:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5159777&cid=47006419

my sentiment boils down to:

Learn the language; don't be a lazy ass and whine about it.

If something's part of the language, but you're not familiar with it, that does not constitute it being "confusing".

Americans these days can't cognitively separate their perspective and the more general one. If I find something hard, then it just must be hard, right? I mean, a whole host of other people couldn't possibly have a completely different experience. That's unfathomable to today's human beings.

I've decided that I don't need to live in a big house. Therefore no one does. Therefore there's no moral problem with passing a law that forbids anyone from living in more than a 1032 sq ft abode (like mine). My experience must the universal one.

I should fucking market a line of t-shirts and baseball caps with "YMMV" with a red circle and slash over it. Because no one is capable of the concept donning on them anymore.

Smitty has recently linked to a Heritage Foundation page trying to distance itself from the mandate in the health insurance act of 2010. It isn't a surprise that they would want to try to make it look like the mandate wasn't their idea, as it is wildly unpopular with their base. What is surprising, though, is how epically they failed in distancing themselves from it.

For example (from the actual article):

That rather plainly shows that indeed people in the Heritage Foundation wanted a mandate. Reading on...

Isn't that the same kind of "herd mentality" that they are demonizing the democrats over right now?

And the supreme court ruled that the mandate in the 2010 bill is, indeed, a tax. The stick analogy does not hold here.

... same as above.

So in other words, the Heritage Foundation acknowledges that the mandate in the Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 is a facsimile of what they wanted. They can pretend that they somehow did not have a role in the crafting of this lousy bill, but they cannot show that they have not advocated for what it does.