Random thoughts and links

Even with Chavez turning Venezuela into a banana republic, it is nice to see that there are still people there who are willing to call a spade, a spade. It takes courage to call out a high-ranking official in a country like that for being such a contemptible hypocrite on national television. That is real courage, unlike the "courage" it takes to criticize the Bush Administration, a regime that couldn't silence its critics if it tried.

Nintendo Wii shortages may cost Nintendo as much as $1B in lost sales opportunities. I think it may be even higher than that when you factor in all of the money that Nintendo may be missing out on from casual gamers who won't buy many--or any--of the bigger titles that cost over $19.99-$29.99. It'll be interesting to see who wins this season between Microsoft and Sony. Between Mass Effect and Halo, which have already sold 1M and 5M copies respectively, I suspect it will be Microsoft.

A perfect example of why it can be so hard to get used to Perl:

die "failed!" if scalar (@myArray)==1 and not defined $array[0];

The algorithm is pretty self-explanatory, though the code is one heck of a run on sentence as far as source code goes. Someone who comes from a language where such terse code is not commonly accepted or possible would probably write:

if ( scalar(@myArray) and not defined($array[0]) )
{
     die("Failed!");
}

This is part of the reason why at best I am still just dabbling in Perl. It can be so hard to read so much of the code written by seasoned Perl developers. This is the only language out there which can break the encryption on a DVD in 7 lines of code.

I agree with this take on Mike Huckabee. He shows many of the signs of being another annoying nannystatist Christian politician, just like Jimmy Carter. We need a President who isn't folksy; we need a President who is very well-educated, experienced and principled. A man or woman who is well above the rest in terms of character, education and knowledge of the issues facing America. I have never understood the logic behind the populism that prefers folksy candidates, since they tend to screw up at least as much as the "elitist" ones.

This is right up there with the zero tolerance policies for being just plain stupid. Giving a student detention for using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. The student didn't get in trouble for installing software that he shouldn't have, but rather because the teacher was too stupid to realize that Firefox was a web browser, and that the student was using it to do the work that he had been assigned. **UPDATE**: Apparently this was an elaborate hoax. Given the way that most public schools behave with respect to logic, common sense and decency, can you blame most of us for falling for it?

Now it looks like humans were not to blame for the extinction of the Mammoths as previously thought. Turns out that it was trees, yes, trees, that caused the extinction of Mammoths. Forests took over much of the terrain that used to be the grasslands where the Mammoths grazed, causing their numbers to dwindle due to starvation and population pressures.