Comments on: Holy Crap

By: Neil B.

Neil B. — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:41:04 +0000

Sean was prescient. Here are the latest historic results, close to being final figures:

Obama 37.53; Edwards 29.88; Clinton 29.41
Huckabee 34; Romney 25; Thompson 14; McCain 13%; Paul 10%

I wish Obama the best of luck from now on, but I am still not sure who is best. He will need to stand up under closer scrutiny now, and must show more defining substance. Winning this means being more than boy wonder now.

As for Huckabee, how interesting. See what Andrew Sullivan has to say about all that, at http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.

By: The Almighty Bob

The Almighty Bob — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:48:10 +0000

I was being too clever by half; I was thinking of the complexity that would be engendered in indexing by differentiation, rather than doing the heavy lifting in the application. Dumb of me. That’ll teach me not to post before coffee.

The complexity of taking a page of Google results and running a character match on it ranges from using your browser’s ‘find’ function with “match case” on, to writing your own search that uses Google for its first-order results…

(PS: anyone interested in websearching should know about Fravia – so now you you do “,)

By: Neil B.

Neil B. — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:37:29 +0000

Bob, I think you misframed the issue and the supposed problems thereof. As it stands, I type in “NeXttG” and it just looks for “nexttg” by ignoring capitalization, which is no extra work because either case is just accepted for each character. OTOH, if I could ask for case-sensitive, it would search for that particular ASCII character string, which is no extra work either, it’s just a matchup task. They have no excuse IMHO for not having direct ASCII search per se (which includes case-sensitive as a subset.) Now, I do know that Google knows to look for the “CIA” if I type in “cia”, but that is about recognizing important names in the world and not character recognition as such.

I will look into regex but don’t think that vitiates my complaint.

What were you thinking? I know there’s a temptation to say to yourself, “But *they* couldn’t really be that stupid/lazy/unconcerned, so” … and then you contrive a kludgey rationalization for what the big boys do. They count on people doing that, just so they can get away with often being stupid/lazy/unconcerned.

By: The Almighty Bob

The Almighty Bob — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:16:44 +0000

#55 Kluge; YOU (or y’all, if you prefer) have one. Unfortunately, even if you do it by percentage of speakers you’d be outvoted on making it official (check “population of India” if you feel I’m wrong

By: The Almighty Bob

The Almighty Bob — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:10:40 +0000

Google does lower-case only due to the fun and games that differentiating would cause. How would you like having to re-search your query with all the different possible capitalisations? That’s what we’d have to do to get current functionality if there was no “don’t differentiate” option. If there was an option, they would have to search generate all possible capitalisations, search them all, then return the union of the results. By the time you’ve scaled this up to millions of searches daily, then start doing it in different languages, you can understand why they decided not to bother.

Have you tried searching your phrase, then running the results through a regex? (the link is Wikipedia – I know, but sometimes there just isn’t a better reference to hand).

By: Neil B.

Neil B. — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:18:11 +0000

Kluge, you have a point even though I still like Obama. He talks a lot about change and where we need to go, but I want to be sure he has worked all that out well enough.

(Hey, are you a computer type? People pick on Microsoft for this and that, and me too for e.g. not even having a good way to print lists of files from directories, but how can Google get away with not having, IIUC, a case-sensitive search? (And direct character string search) It is often so inconvenient.

By: Kluge

Kluge — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 06:11:02 +0000

Ah, I see I was beaten to the punch with y’all.

Anyway, Obama seems far too inexperienced (as his relatively meager record and campaign missteps show) to be President at this point in his career.

I’m also disturbed by how much his campaign is about how wonderful and “different” he is personally, rather than about his policies. IMO, a candidate’s policies are the best guide to their character.

While there are things I don’t like about Hillary, I think we need someone who will be able to deal with the firestorm of criticism that will come from the right, and who knows how to get things done in the Washington we have, not the one we wished we had.

By: Kluge

Kluge — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 05:26:04 +0000

Neil B. (#26)

We have one; it’s y’all…

By: The Almighty Bob

The Almighty Bob — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:47:08 +0000

Ah. We were talking at cross-purposes. Impeachment may well be absolutely necessary to the continued health of American democracy; I feel unqualified to comment authoritatively. I was saying that, outside the US, its impact would be marginal.

I am in favor of all your ideas for change.

You know the really sad part? The only ‘change’ in that list is Kyoto. Everything else is attempting to put the situation back the way Clinton left it.
(Mentioning him… HOW did you impeach him for a blowjob when the current monkey seems untouchable?)

By: Diocletian

Diocletian — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:26:32 +0000

As I said, Almighty, impeachment is essential to the political education of the American people. I am in favor of all your ideas for change, but unless Americans can understand how they were fooled then they will only be misled again. GWB himself said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time – and those are the ones you want to focus on.”

Having said that, I appreciate that impeachment is a near impossibility. The prosecuting entities are complicit in the crimes of Bush. Further, the media that would report on impeachment proceedings iare also complicit in Bush’s crimes by supporting the blatant lies about WMDs and by failure to investigate and report on dozens of other Bush lies that daily lead us closer to our destruction.

There is hope though that Bush et al. will be prosecuted sometime after they leave office. If so, I hope they will be tried in the U.S. rather than in the International Criminal Court. I would like to see death penalties imposed on the principals.