Politicians are Dumb

I've got so much to talk about today that it's hard to pin a title to it! But I decided to start out with a topic I wanted to address a few days ago. Why would you want to discourage education in an unstable economy? I would really like Mr. Bush to explain that to me. Instead of cutting funds from areas like fancy inaugurations and useless tax cuts (they're only meant to provide a temporary stimulus, not permanent) he's cutting programs that help nearly half a million students get a higher education. I know that doesn't sound like much, but it all adds up when they graduate with a higher than average salary and contribute to taxes. The best thing to do when we have crises in unskilled labor markets is to try to encourage education so people can get better jobs. Apparantly this concept is lost on conservatives. It's really quite disturbing that these are the people who are running our country and pissing all over our economy.

Ok, enough ranting for now. AICN put up some reviews of an early screening of a rough cut of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It doesn't sound so good so far so I hope that they manage to spruce it up a bit before the release because I was looking forward to this movie. In other movie news, it looks like Disney is going downhill. They broke up with Pixar (which is owned by Steve Jobs) and so now they're have trouble finding a director for Toy Story 3 since none of the good ones want to get on Pixar's bad side! Not to mention that Tom Hanks left the project as well. I'm sure that Pixar will leave Disney in the dust now that they're so well-known and respected.

And now it's time for some nerdy news. First off, some malware has been spreading rapidly regarding Windows MySQL installations because of weak password-protected systems. It's kind of sad that someone would want to do that since MySQL is open source and is supposed to be programmer friendly. The other thing is that some high school kid got a hefty jail sentence for releasing a variant of the Blaster worm and screwing up 48,000+ systems in the process. I feel a little sorry for his mental state, but what he did is a disgrace to programmers everywhere and it really did a lot of damage. The last thing I wanted to mention was this awesome article about writing good code. I think it's a must read for all programmers. It also condemns Pascal, which is hated because it used to be the standard for teaching CS majors in introductory courses and because of its mild similarities to the annoyance that is BASIC. I haven't actually written in Pascal and am trying to avoid it, but I'm sure I will eventually have to.

Alright you've almost reached the end now. I just wanted to bring up a few notable things in video games. Konami is going back to Castlevania's old school adventure roots with Curse of Darkness, and it sounds like an interesting game but the videos don't really impress me yet. It appears that the Nintendo Revolution, the Sony PS3, and the Xbox Next will all make an appearance at this year's E3, which will take place in May. This is a big deal because so far all three companies are being really hush-hush about them. And finally, it looks like small developer Blue 52 is trying to make a name for itself with Stolen. You can read some great first impressions here.It's supposed to be a true stealth game since you don't actually kill anyone, and it looks kinda like this:



Now the moment you've all been waiting for, the Friday Fiver:

1. Do you use profanity?
When your code doesn't compile you pretty much have to. Or when your climbing a rock wall and there's no conceivable way to get any higher up.

2. What are your favorite words of frustration?
Dumbass, holy shit, and from Donnie Darko, fuckass.

3. Did your parents ever swear in front of you?
They still do! Everything except the f-bomb.

4. Do you think that films should be rated based on the language they use?
To a certain degree, yes. I think exposing kids to too much profanity definitely has an effect on their psyche. It's not that they don't know the words, it's that the movie almost rationalizes their use and I myself really only curse in a poignant situation.

5. If you could curse our someone right now, who would it be?
George W. Bush or any Christian fundamentalist would do.

Have a great weekend everybody and please don't smoke!