Who can avoid talking about the war? My feeling on the war is now on record, I suppose (support, contingent on dedicated and sincere attempt to reconstruct Iraq; if it self-destructs it should be despite our efforts, not because of them), but I wanted to comment on a couple of criticisms that I feel are either disingenuous or invalid.

• "Bush (and by extension the administration) is stupid." - No. The administration may be wrong, corrupt, or a wide variety of other things, but it is not stupid.Note that we do not have access to a lot of information the administration does. Note also that it is almost never a good idea to completely tip your hand during war. The fact is that if all of its actions made sense to everybody that would probably be a very, very bad sign.Lest you think I'm violating my first paragraph and supporting Bush, I am not, because this cuts both ways. Accusations of stupidity absolve the administration of responsibility in a certain sense. The administration is going into this with eyes wide open, and with almost certainly millions of man-hours spent analysing the results to the n-th degree. Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise to score a cheap shot.This goes for any non-pathological, non-degenerate government. I'd love to define that more precisely but a reasonable approximation is a government that consists of a reasonable number of people sharing power (not one person will full control) with a reasonable distribution of that power. Such governments are often many things but truly stupid is not usually one of them.
• "Bush is just gung-ho for war.", implied as the sole or majority reason for war - Related to the administration not being stupid, I can't imagine the economic doldrums have escaped the attention of the administration, nor the strong correlation between the economy and re-election chances, regardless of any other effects. Further, it is quite likely that doing nothing, especially after the basic clean-up in Afghanistan, would not have negative consequences until the next President is in power, so the easy thing for the administration to do would be to allow the UN to dick around for the next two years at its toothless leisure. The odds are inaction would bite the next guy, not them. Something other then mere "bloodlust" is driving the President in this direction, strong enough to overcome the patently obvious downsides to war for the administration itself.I submit that it is at least plausible that the motivation of the administration is quite likely to be almost exactly what they say it is; considered honestly, true idealism and the true belief these are necessary actions is the only motivation that makes sense, when simply doing nothing is so much easier and immensely more monetarily profitable for everybody. I even have to admit that I expected worse on the civil liberties front, but that the administration seems to be genuinely focused on their stated goals, not using this as an excuse to tighten the reigns at home. (Which isn't to say I approve fully or intend to be any less interested and diligent, but I do admit a certain surprise.)Again, nobody can say for certain that the actions they are taking will have the outcome they desire, nor am I commenting directly on the desirability of that outcome at this time. All I'm saying is attributing this to bloodlust or desire for glory, while certainly easy (downright intellectually lazy), is disingenuous.

There's room for a lot of opinions on these issues going each way; the world is now directly in the middle of a major transition to a new way of doing business that started in 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the on-going development of powerful weapons technologies cheap enough for any country to acquire. Things probably won't finish shaking down until 2010 or so, roughly, and things won't look the way they did before. (Look for the concept of "sovereignity" to undergo a lot of changes, for instance, as the world keeps shrinking.) There's a lot of new ambiguity and uncertainty. If nothing else, if you oppose the Bush administration's views, you do nothing to convince others by attacking shallow characterizations of it. It's not stupidity, and it's not simple bloodlust.

In reaction to my previous post, Rafe posts an update...

My intention was to talk a bit about how Perl and Java differ, not explain how one should construct a program.

Yes, and I was one meta above that. I should have made it more clear we were discussing different levels.

He also says that you should avoid Perl's idioms, but then the question I ask is whether you should use Perl at all? I know sometimes you have no choice ...

That's what it is in this case. I work on a mod_perl application, and I came on the project quite a few years after that decision was made. My opinion on that issue is quite irrelevant. ;-) Also, considering when the system was started, mod_perl was the best of many evils; having used ASP, it beats the hell out of that. So in context, I actually support the use of perl in this instance.

Rafe Colburn explains why Algol-like languages are far superior to Perl for working on large scale, multi-programmer, long-term projects. I'd go further. If you use an outliner to edit your source code, his multi-line Java example shrinks down to one line, just like his Perl example. If you don't program in an outliner I'm sure you have no idea what I just said. If you do, you're probably chortling and guffawing and pointing at the screen saying "See what I said." [Scripting News]

For what it's worth, both the Perl and Java in the linked article are wrong. The correct solution in both cases is to write a function "dirDepth" or something that takes a path and counts the depth, then call that function. The Java one may be more complicated-looking, but that's OK. The original Blosxom solution unnecessarily ties the program to the UNIX platform, which is the only one you can depend on for '/' to be the path delimiter with no exceptions.

Please ignore if you're not into computing theory.

Says Den Beste:

My original statement was that a single Turing machine cannot perfectly simulate a system which consists of two Turing machines such that the ratio of the clock rates for those two Turing machines is a transcendental number.... [attempted proof clipped] ... Am I right? ... Can my proposed idea be restated in a way which truly does make it uncomputable?

When do you know that you've got the right answer to a programming conundrum? When the answer means you delete lots of code, and the final product is more efficient, more flexible, and more robust. I love programming.

I don't want this to turn into a political 'blog ("warblog") but I have a few comments to make, focused by an article by ex-President Carter. I'll try to make sure the points are "fresh"... i.e., I haven't seen them made elsewhere. I assume you read the article first.

The war can be waged only as a last resort, with all nonviolent options exhausted. In the case of Iraq, it is obvious that clear alternatives to war exist.

For those who don't track Slashdot, a very interesting review of a book carefully studying the feasibility of a Space Elevator was posted.

For those who don't know what a space elevator is, here's the basics: A satellite is put in geosynchronous orbit around the earth, which is where the satellite always stays above the same point on Earth. A tether from the satellite is extended down to the surface of the Earth, and another is extended away from the Earth a roughly equal distance.

The next generation of News Aggregators should use Bayesian-style filtering to allow a user to indicate what kind of stories they like. Possibly even sorting them out by categories, because you may not be able to capture my preferences in a single filter.

This is not a new idea any more then Bayesian email filtering is, but perhaps the focus it has received in the email filtering role will encourage people to recognize its power in other applications as well.

I've spent most of today moving stuff from the house to the third dumpster. If the stuff in the house was that valuless, in a sense I was living in a dumpster. Most of the stuff I'm throwing away now, on shelves, in the house, had not been touched in years. I got a clue about this when I spent most of the last quarter of 2002 in New York. I did pretty well with a suitcase, knapsack, laptop and cellphone. There really wasn't much more that I needed, or much more that I could even use.... I realize I probably would be happier with a really nice room, a large one, with a deck and a hot tub, bathroom and shower, and access to a kitchen for the rare times I create a meal, and that's about it. Having a car is nice, but I don't need anything on the order of the kinds of possessions that have accumulated in this very nice house-dumpster. [Scripting News]

I was raised middle-class to upper-middle-class (in later years as my father progressed). I always wondered how I'd do being much less well off when I lived on my own while I was going to college and getting my grad degree. And the answer has pleasently surprised me; I'm quite happy the way things are, with a two-bedroom apartment and a quite modest amount of stuff.

My laptop just self-immolated. Other then the fact that the warrentee repairs will take "up to three weeks", am I saddened? Nope. I finally got a decent backup scheme going, and I only lost perhaps a sum total of an hour of work.

It is likely that the repair technicians will not have to wipe the hard drive (unless the sight of Linux freaks them out when they fix it), but even so, I'm not afraid of data loss, because I've got it all right here.