Jeff Pratt › Comments

How true. How very true. - Jeff Pratt

[Thirty-nine] other Democrats were given a pass on the vote, as the leadership knows how unpopular this bill is in most of America. They know this legislation is not the result of some national consensus in favor of expanding state power. Its passage was possible only because of temporary liberal majorities that are intent on fulfilling their dreams of a cradle-to-grave entitlement state. - Jeff Pratt

"Missing Boba Fett in the Special Edition of Episode IV." - Jeff Pratt

"Completely wrong about libertarianism." - Jeff Pratt

"Perhaps something like this: Assume (0, 1) has a maximum. Call it 1 - \epsilon, where \epsilon is a very small number. Now consider \epsilon / 2, which is less than \epsilon. Then 1 - \epsilon / 2 is greater than 1 - \epsilon, but is still less than 1. We can keep dividing \epsilon by 2 an arbitrary number k times, like this: \epsilon / 2^k. For all k, 1 - \epsilon / 2^k is less than 1, so (0, 1) has no maximum." - Jeff Pratt

"Carthago dalenda est" - Jeff Pratt

"[T]he willful and violent ending of a family's life must never become one more story at which we glance briefly and then turn the newspaper page or zap to another channel on the cable box or click to the next screen on our laptop. For if we lose our capacity to be shattered when this happens, then we have lost a part of ourselves." - Jeff Pratt

Applying these principles to President Barack Obama's health-care proposal, it's clear that his plan is unconstitutional at its core. - Jeff Pratt

At my core, I don’t trust or want the government making those rationing decisions. Not trusting the government to ration properly doesn’t make me incompassionate or evil. Trusting the government to do it doesn’t make you good or moral. Government rationing isn’t the definition of compassion & goodness.... And I don’t buy the argument that “everyone else does it this way” means that it’s right for America or even the best way to do it period. How many of the wonder drugs of the last two decades were developed in countries with government-run and managed health care systems? I thought so. We may be losing more than we intend by making that switch. - Jeff Pratt

[W]e continue to see one example after another of what suspicious readers may be tempted to view as the Big Lie: that deregulation or other obliging government measures caused the present economic mess. I won't go so far as to characterize this claim as a Big Lie. Although some of its purveyors, acting out of partisan motives, surely know that they are blowing smoke, others may simply suffer from economic ignorance, analytical confusion, or loss of historical memory. In any event, the public is ill-served by commentators who purport to speak with authority about our current economic troubles, yet merely peddle this worse-than-sophomoric tale. - Jeff Pratt

Why doesn't Charlie Rangel donate, say, $900,000 to the poor right now? - Jeff Pratt

White House health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the 'overuse' of medical care. - Jeff Pratt

"If we do not face facts and realize our own worse enemy is debt and our inability to save, and fail to start paying down debt, both personal and national, we could actually face the prospect of default. And then our future will be riddled with poverty, sorrow and social strains and upheaval never thought possible in America." - Jeff Pratt

"Now, bucking under the weight of economic distortions and regulations, the law of supply and demand is wreaking vengeance on those least able to pay. Medicare and Social Security are approaching insolvency, insurance companies are forbidden from selling across state lines or from offering innovative health savings accounts, and the solution offered is—even more programs, with a price tag so large that it that cannot be grasped by the human mind..... The primary cause of medical price increases is the government coercions. But the cause of the coercions is the idea that health care is a right. Until we understand that nothing is a 'right' if others must be forced to provide it, we will continue to swallow the same poison, and we will reap even worse consequences in the future." - Jeff Pratt

Apple’s technology is gorgeous all right. But as Apple gets more power, a funny thing is happening on the farm. Innovation and expression on Apple’s iPhone platform are beginning to suffer, even as Apple insists that its restrictions are for our own good. And as we gaze out at the titans of the tech landscape, it’s getting difficult to tell which are the humans and which are the pigs. - Jeff Pratt

The goal of this project is to provide a Swing implementation of the Office 2007 ribbon container and related components. The components have consistent visuals under the existing core and third-party look-and-feels, respect the DPI settings of the user desktop and follow the core Swing guidelines in the external APIs and the internal implementation details. - Jeff Pratt

"There’s plenty of outrage these days, and that can be seen by the activism at town hall meetings around the country. But think of it this way - If, instead of making demands on federal politicians who don’t listen to us anyway, all this energy was instead focused on state governments, we’d probably see 10 or 20 health nullification bills in states already. And Obama’s health care program would be just that much closer to being dead in the water today." - Jeff Pratt

"I think the IAU did a terrible disservice to science, because it gives the public the impression that science is done by votes," Sykes said. "And that's not the way science is done at all." - Jeff Pratt

"In short, bigger government appears to produce only bigger and longer recessions." - Jeff Pratt

"We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night. The precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say, 'You now are entering Imperium.'" - Jeff Pratt

Socialized medical systems have not served to raise general health or living standards anywhere. In fact, both analytical reasoning and empirical evidence point to the opposite conclusion. But the dismal failure of socialized medicine to raise people's health and longevity has not affected its appeal for politicians, administrators, and their intellectual servants in search of absolute power and total control. - Jeff Pratt

How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It: An August 2009 Update - Jeff Pratt

Python to JavaScript bridge interface. - Jeff Pratt

FluidDB is an online "cloud" database. Using a flexible underlying representation of information and a new model of control, it allows users and applications to work with information more naturally. That includes dynamically organizing, sharing, combining and augmenting information, and searching in ways that have previously not been possible. It also allows users to choose exactly which information to share with whom, with separate controls for reading and writing. - Jeff Pratt

If you want your software to be experienced by as many users as possible, there is absolutely no better route than a web app. The web is the most efficient, most pervasive, most immediate distribution network for software ever created. - Jeff Pratt

"Total protonic reversal..." - Jeff Pratt

"Article I, Section 12 of the Constitution of the State of Virginia: "Section 12. Freedom of speech and of the press; right peaceably to assemble, and to petition. That the freedoms of speech and of the press are among the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained except by despotic governments; that any citizen may freely speak, write, and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right; that the General Assembly shall not pass any law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, nor the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances."" - Jeff Pratt

Android’s platform and developer tools are excellent. Leveraging Java and the Eclipse IDE are major winning factors for Android. Apple’s developer tools are shockingly bad by comparison. The Objective-C language and platform APIs are cumbersome and poorly organized. Overall when developing for the iPhone I felt like I was back in 1993. These factors combined in my estimation make application development about three times more expensive when developing for iPhone. The only area where Apple’s developer tools excelled was in profiling and heap analysis. - Jeff Pratt

"Murray Rothbard said, more than once, that there was nothing wrong about a person not fully understanding economics; but that those ignorant of economic principles ought not to be proposing governmental policies to govern economic activity. I have a hard time imagining Murray remaining calm as multitudes of men and women – with nary an understanding of economics – consult their Ouija boards for additional 'solutions' to the calculated chaos generated by earlier practitioners of political mysticism." - Jeff Pratt

Congresswoman Maxine Waters on what she'd like to do with the oil industry, and Congressman Barney Frank on what he'd like to do with the medical industry. - Jeff Pratt