Derek’s Blog

This just found in the “Is she still talking?” file: Palin had some harsh, folksy words for Obama about national defense:

Reducing Alaska’s defense readiness in these perilous times is a show of weakness, it is not a sign of strength. Washington thinks it’s best now to actually cut defense spending in Alaska by hundreds of millions of dollars. Now that is an odd priority there.

It’s not odd at all. Robert Gates’ budget actually increases overall defense spending by 4%. But more importantly, it shifts money from decisively failed programs (like Palin’s beloved missile defense) to spending that will actually help fight modern wars (i.e., those not started by Stalin). Of course I hate war as much as anyone, but it’s not going away, so the least we can do is spend money on technology that will bring more of our troops home and ruin fewer civilian lives instead of building useless, expensive missiles that will never justify their existence.

Sure, reality sucks for states that specialize in making useless, expensive missiles that will never justify their existence, but c’est la vie. The simple truth is that missile defense programs have been failing since before Reagan. It’s time to admit that and move on. Just because Palin’s state is at the forefront of obsolescence doesn’t entitle her to screech for federal money that could instead be spent protecting troops and civilians.

What grates on my nerves whenever this opportunistic harpy shrieks is her complete immunity to the hypocrisy of her folksy nonsense. I don’t understand how she can keep a straight face while condemning aligning defense spending with modern threats, making self-serving demands to fund proven failures in the name of national security, or decrying the loss of federal funds in the first place — after all, isn’t national defense a form of socialism?

Of course she saves the best for last, saying that Alaskans believe in “the roots of our country, so deep, so strong”:

They’re what we need to cling to. Clinging to, you know, that includes our clinging to our second amendment rights, and our faith in God. Many of us do cling to that strong faith in God.

Because nothing strengthens security like tossing the keys to the missiles to the nuts rooting for the Apocalypse.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say, about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.

I don’t care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re not.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.

Perl: the only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Saying that Java is good because it works on all platforms is like saying anal sex is good because it works on all genders.

XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.

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