I’m not sure how Donald Trump can be so prolific on Twitter and not have the faintest idea how the internet works. I thought that in 2015 everyone knew that “the Internet is not something that you just dump something on (like a beheading video). It’s not a big truck (with a giant bomb on board). It’s a series of tubes.” And. also, it doesn’t really belong to us. And there’s this stuff called encryption.
Anyway, Trump thought he was being a tough guy in the debate last night.
“Isis is using the internet better than we are using the internet, and it was our idea,” the 69-year-old entrepreneur told the audience in Las Vegas.
“We should be able to penetrate the internet and find out exactly where Isis is and everything about Isis. We can do that if we use our good people.”
But I don’t think he came off as tough.
I think he came off as ridiculous.
Everyone and their brother has been trying to find the magic elixir that will make people turn away from Trump and see him for the fraud that he is.
This is the type of thing that could actually do it, at least among people under fifty.
I think people under 50, generally, see it. They just aren’t the people that vote in GOP primaries.
Internet use by people <50 may be 100%, but that doesn’t mean more than 1% have any idea how it works.
And the people who support Trump don’t have much of a clue about anything. Why should the internet be any different?
True, but I think Trump doesn’t even know how it feels. Because he’s never used it interactively: he sends, and all the little people receive.
You hear that? ISIS is winning the war of perception!
That’s not what he said in that quote.
The quote is word for word correct. You can interpret it however you like of course.
Maybe he has penetration on his mind. Just sayin’
I’m pretty sure that it’s Trump’s staff who are so prolific on Twitter.
I’m not at all confident of that. Like Rumsfeld and his snowflakes, or old Malcolm Forbes and his Thoughts of the Day (of course that was institutionalized long before he died), Trump has spent his whole life sending out brief missives of command and opinion that the staff is supposed to turn into reality. That’s what he thinks work is, for a person in his position.
No doubt he has his staffread Twitter for him so he knows who to insult, but I’ll bet he does a yuuuge amount of the writing.
You know that there are a few of us old codgers over 50 (that have been posting here for many years) that understand that the intertoobs version of the internet was obsolete shortly after the Jurassic age.
In part because we at least observed the evolution and know what it was like before consumers had any electronic gizmos.
I wonder what percentage of Trump supporters believe in evolution…
Rough guess 20%. (42% of Americans believe in creationism, but unfortunately, not all of that 42% are Republicans.)
While younger folks understand technology from the consumer end, some of us understand it from the production end.
I learned COBOL in 1968, and have learned many other languages since. No one in my house is better at computer stuff than I am.
Dataguy, somehow it doesn’t surprise me that the first computer language you would learn would be COBOL.
Old computer joke:
If you program in Basic you talk to yourself
If you program in COBOL you talk to the printer
If you program in Fortran you talk to the computer
If you program in C you talk to God
If you program in Assembler … God answers.
This. Is awesome.
What specifically do you know about computer languages? In 1968, I was in high school. We (4 of us in my high school) picked out a class. Since we knew nothing, and google was not there to advise us, we picked COBOL, which I have never used since. I subsequently learned ForTran, Pl/1, C, C++, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Perl, Python, TeX/LaTeX, Emacs LISP, SAS (6-7 sublanguages).
So, I probably know more languages than a lot of people.
i think most of us know a lot of languages. That’s my favorite question for techies my age, “how many dead languages do you know?”.
can i even remember all of them? no Cobol. Your list from PL/1 through Perl, moto 6809 assy, moto 68K assy, 8051 assy, x88 assy, Forth (anyone else use Forth?), visual basic, c#, mysql, tsql, PHP.
Of course I don’t remember all of them. However, I can learn a new one somewhat quickly. The only sticking point is the special and unique feature of the new language. For instance, although I understand the idea of inheritance and overloading operators, I haven’t actually written a program which uses them.
I do enjoy programming. I have written a system, first in Perl, then in Python (a superior tool, IMHO), to first read a directory of picture files, create a small list which I can edit (and put in labels for the pictures), process the picture files with a second program, and finally rewrite new pictures using ImageMagick to include the labels, and create a .pdf using LaTeX to have all the pictures in it. The approach can do a variety of simple manipulations (rotate 90 d left, right; append two images together). I am learning wxPython to make a GUI for this.
First computer language I learned was ALGOL. Codes were printed out on decks of cards. God help you if you drop your deck on the way to the reader.
I also used APL, which was great because it was interactive and no cards were involved.
Since then, I settled on Fortran to do all my scientific work, although I also do most code development in Mathematica. These languages are all very similar; once you get the hand of one the others follow easily.
yeah, ALGOL was fun. No goto to screw up the works. APL was a gas. I wrote a linear regression in 17 symbols … recursive no less (and yes I know APL did not support recursion … but I did it anyway).
My first language was Assembler (specifically PDP-8).
I looked at my last cv that listed my languages: 26. All of them dead. And that doesn’t count the databases … also dead (Paradox, Clarion, R-Base, D-Base, Revelation and more).
‘Tis a pity.
Egads – APL and Paradox? I haven’t heard those names in decades. You guys are killing me.
Dataguy, I too was in highschool in ’68 but yours must have been nicer than mine ’cause I didn’t see a computer until university in the early 70’s. In highschool we performed computations using slide rules. I wish I still had mine.
I had to go downtown to IIT in Chicago. We didn’t have any thing like this in highschool.
I too had a slide rule, but mine was a circular slide rule – about 15″ in diameter, with the outer rule (there were about 10 scales) have the length of the circumference – 3.2 * 15 = 47″.
Some fucking turd stole it at some point, which pissed the hell out of me, and it was weird because I never saw anyone who had it.
I think it was more like 11″ in diameter or 33″ in circumference.
That’s a big one! Mine was linear but some of my friends used 4 or 5 inch circular slide rules
are you taking the TN legislature definition of pi, as exactly 3? (just kidding)
What about Wolfram?
I have heard about Wolfram language, but have never seen any example of it. I suspect that it is more useful in symbolic derivation applications, but I don’t know. Wolfram is clearly a smart cookie, but often his comments seem pretty inflated. His description of the Wolfram language sounded like inflated claims to me. But perhaps I am wrong.
I just did a google for it. You can find it at
http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/LanguageOverview.html
Oddly enough, I went to U of I, possibly with Wolfram, who established Mathematica in Champaign-Urbana. But I have never used Mathematica, nor do I know anyone who uses it. I wouldn’t find much use for it in applied statistics.
Take a look at this recent article in the NYT.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/stephen-wolfram-seeks-to-democratize-his-software/
oh that’s great. can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.
You want to defeat Trump? making fun of him isn’t going to do the trick. As I said when he first started his rise:
Duh!!!
You really want to defeat Trump?
Here’s how.
21 “hows,” actually.
21 Questions For Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston.
Below I include a number of the more salient ones:
Why have these questions and others like them not been publicly asked by the PermaGov-controlled media so-called “opponents” of Mr. Trump?
I can only think of a few possible reasons, myself.
1-The media is making big money off of his “Trump: The Candidate” show.
2-If these sorts of questions were to be publicly, aggressively asked in the mass media, it would tear the cover off of all of the other dirty dealings that constitute U.S. politics, up to and including the whole series of Clinton boondoggles that started in Arkansas. Can’t be having that, right?
Who’d run the ship of Deep State?
Riiiiight…
WTFU.
It’s all a clown show.
All of it.
Meanwhile, the owners of the circus continue to fleece the rubes.
WTFU
AG
This post…in slightly expanded form…is now up as a standalone article.
You REALLY Want To Defeat Trump? Prove it.
Please comment there if you wish to do so.
Thank you and goodnight.
And now the latest PermaGov news!!!:
Bet on it.
AG
1. You call yourself an “ardent philanthropist,” but have not donated a dollar to The Donald J. Trump Foundation since 2006.
“I give money. I give huge. I’m the biggest philanthropist you’ll ever ever see.”
2. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman successfully sued you, … Why did you not show up?
“Schneiderman is a loser. Did you know that he lost every real estate deal he ever made? I wrote the book on making deals. Why didn’t I show up? I’m a winner. I win huge. I don’t talk to losers.”
3. You claimed The Learning Annex paid you a $1 million speaking fee, but on Larry King Live, you acknowledged the fee was $400,000 and the rest was the promotional value.
“When you understand money the way I do, you understand that promotional value is huge. How much are you worth? I’m winning the Republican primary, never ran for office before. Why am I winning? I understand value and I make deals.”
6 Trump Tower was built by S&A Concrete, whose owners were “Fat” Tony Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, head of the Gambinos, another well-known crime family.
“Business isn’t pattycake. You want a weak loser as a leader? That’s not me. I play hardball, in the big leagues, against guys called Fat and Big Paul, and I win.”
Yes.
Those will indeed be his answer types. You even have his syntax down.
But…and it is a big “but”…is the American electorate reasy to elect a president who played footsie w/the likes of Salerno, Castellano and Scarfa?
I think not.
It’s a good argument…the only one that he can make.
But force him to make that argument and then show that electorate who these people really were.
Show them Trump’s “business partners.”
Show them!!!
Why are they not being shown this?
See above.
Please.
AG
After hearing Trump’s comments on the Iran deal and the money pit that was the Iraq war, I think that HRC is in serious trouble if she faces him in 2016.
The HRC camp apparently thinks that Trump is just another interminable New Right hack like the Bushes, McCain, and Romney. I don’t think they’re prepared to take an attack from the GOP (aided by a compliant and biased corporate media) from the left — mostly because Sanders and O’Malley have gone out of their way not to attack her too hard to avoid depressing turnout.
HRC still doesn’t have a good answer for her financial sector coziness nor her warhawkery other than ‘it’s really different this time!’ And painting the middle class as 250K annual household income and promising not to raise their taxes shows that she doesn’t expect a credible attack from her economic left, least of all from the GOP.
While all the other clowns spent their time running against Obama, I heard those Trump comments to suggest that he was setting up his run against Clinton. Might be a bit more astute than I’d previously given him credit for.
Trump can’t make a run on Hillary’s left while opposing the nuclear deal with Iran. Hillary support the deal, and the diplomacy that won it for us and our coalition partners.
Since The Donald has/will have no credible alternative policy proposal and is campaigning/will campaign on tearing up our Iran agreement and abandoning our international allies, he will be campaigning on waging war with Iran. Because, as he will continue to brag, he’ll make the military sooooo huge WE’LL NEVER LOSE A WAR AGAIN. It’ll fit in nicely with his announced policy to kill Muslim women and children. I only wish I were using hyperbole here, but these really are the policies he’s arguing for.
Economic Left not anti-war Left. If he ran as anti-war, he would lose the Republican base.
For the same reason he can’t run as Social Issue Left.
Only leaves the Populist Left.
Trump doesn’t have to run as anti-war. He just has to run as the ‘I’m against the way these stupid Democrats have been running these stupid wars’ candidate. Republicans have been doing that since the small times and their most notable successes have come from times when stupid Democrats have genuinely been running stupid wars and the attacker doesn’t have their fingerprints on the war — you know, like what Eisenhower and Nixon did. Similarly, Trump doesn’t have to be anti-war; he can just be anti-Iraq War, which most people in the Democratic camp think was stupid to the point of denying HRC the 2008 nomination.
As far as the Iran deal goes, he doesn’t have to praise or like it, he just has to promise to uphold it despite the spooooooky predictions of having to go to war against Israel if Iran blah de blah. Whereupon he’s free to spew unfalsifiable drivel about being able to get a better deal.
“he can just be anti-Iraq War” I see on other sites that it is also one of the reasons their base hates the Bush name, also.
This is an interesting bit of jujitsu or something like that. Don’t know when Trump began trumpeting to the teabaggers that he’d been opposed to the Iraq War from the beginning, but it has been prominent since the beginning of his campaign (the first time I’ve ever paid any attention to him). The magic part is that he’s getting away with this without any evidence that he’d opposed it until a few years in when it was an obvious clusterfuck.
Now, his followers were likely 100% in support of the war. Don’t know when they soured on it, but guess it was after 2008 because they sure didn’t vote for Obama. Not a difficult task for them to twist it into being Obama’s war and then of course, they always opposed it and Trump speaks for them. And they’re just smart enough to have figured out that this is one issue on which Clinton remains vulnerable.
Trump is running on killing the women and children of Muslim men. Trump is running on tearing up the diplomatic agreement with Iran and building up the military and using it so no one will mess with us ever again. His default style is belligerent expressions of macho swagger. Let’s get fucking real: Donald’s supporters assume he would take us to war; THEY WANT THAT. They will WIN AGAIN with The Donald as President.
Trump will run to no one’s left on military and defense issues, Republican or Democrat.
Don’t need you to ‘splain what Trump appears to support and not support nor what his followers want and don’t want. The latter want/don’t want whatever they’re told by their chosen candidate to want/don’t want.
The only thing I and others were discussing was that Trump is currently making a lot of noise about having opposed the Iraq War. Doesn’t seem to matter that his followers supported it and Trump’s claims wrt to BEFORE the war can’t be verified. Nobody knows what’s inside Trump’s head (if anything) and how much of what he says is authentic or merely promotional posturing. He’s a snake oil salesman. One of the tricks of selling is differentiating one’s product from that of one’s competition. And against Clinton he can ride that opposition to the Iraq War right through the general election. That you can’t appreciate its potential effectiveness is your problem not mine.
Yes, since HRC was for it, Trump and his tea clan were always aginst it. “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”.
Do you believe that Trump would beat Hillary in the general election?
Maybe
The other reason that the base hates the Bush name is that they think the Bush’s are too Liberal. No! I’m not making that up! They feel he gave in to the Democrats because he didn’t have a budget like the Ryan Budget. He didn’t end food stamps as just one of many issues. It wasn’t a Tea Party budget. It was a Wall Street budget. “Wall Street” is a dirty word, although “Big Business” isn’t.
You don’t read yahoo finance, so you missed the article where Charles Koch claims to be a Liberal and to have suffered (“harpooned”) because he has tried to help the struggling working class. (Hope you weren’t eating or drinking when you read this.)
Longing for that delusional world of Mad Men where all you had to be was White
…………………
Iowa Man’s Worldview A Lot Like Trump’s
December 15, 2015 11:35 am
By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times (TNS)
DAVENPORT, Iowa — Bruce Goacher, a repo man in a camouflage cap and oil-smudged jacket, praised Donald Trump as he drove his flatbed through Davenport on his way to seize a delinquent borrower’s car.
Trump’s call for barring Muslims from entering the United States may have sparked an international uproar, but it only reinforced Goacher’s support for the Republican Party’s top contender for president.
“He says let’s not bring nobody here until we get to the bottom of it,” Goacher said Tuesday over the rumble of the tow truck’s engine. “I agree 100 percent.”
Men like Goacher are the main reason Trump has sustained his lead in the Republican presidential race for six months. Poll after poll has found that white men with no college degree are among the New York tycoon’s most avid supporters.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/iowa-mans-worldview-a-lot-like-trumps/
Candidates above 40% in national polling 45 days before Iowa.
Ford
Reagan
Carter
Mondale
Bush
Dole
Bush
Gore
Clinton
Only 1 lost. I think Trump is going to be beaten in Iowa and New Hampshire, and will not be one of the final two fighting for the nomination. But 40% is kind of a magic number in Presidential Primary Politics.
Trump can win.
Trump gets beaten in New Hampshire? By who and why?
Chris Christie. Because neighbor state, and NH actually has sensible people.
NJ is not a neighboring state, and NH has sensible people, but not necessarily a plurality of sensible people in its GOP.
neighbor state in an alphabetical list
One of
Christie
Rubio
Bush
Not sure who. I am not convinced that people really going to actually pull the level for him. Losing Iowa will hurt him in New Hampshire – but Cruz is a bad fit for NH.
You mean only 1 lost the party nomination, correct?
Correct.
Who beats Trump in New Hampshire? He is closest to enjoying a home court advantage there, and he has a natural demographic (right-leaning exurbanites from Boston) there.
Where area you getting those numbers? I’d be shocked if 45 days before the Iowa caucus if Carter even had a 40% national name recognition among DEM primary voters.
Nate presented some poll numbers for 1992 — the average for July-Dec 1991. Clinton’s name recognition was at 30% or less and his poll average was 8.3%.
Carter was in 80. The point is very simple, Trump’s lead is far more like leads from presumptive front runners in the past than other leaders at this point
The closest numbers in ’76 to this point were
Humphrey 30
Wallace 20
McGovern 10
Muskie 7
Carter was listed in a group and all were described as below 3.
In ’92 NH was on Feb 18, and Iowa was not contested.
Closest to 45 days out were:
Pew, 1/3 1/7
Brown 20, Clinton 16, Kerry 14, Tsognas 6
Gallup 1/3 – 1/6
Brown 21, Clinton 17, Kerry 11, Tsongas 6
Other races where there was no clear front runner at this point:
’88 Dem, After Hart’s re-entry on mid-Dec
Hart 30, Jackson 20, Dukakis 15, Simon 8
No one believed Hart would really win, though.
’08 GOP
Guiliani 29, Thompson 15, Huckabee 11, McCain 9, Romney 9
’12 GOP
Quinippiac 11/14 – 11/20
Gingrich 26, Romney 22, Santorum 2
Gingrich did hit 40 once, though he was mostly in the low 30’s 30 days out.
“Penetrate” is a perfectly good word. Just because some who hear it consider it to be only a sexual term does not make it a sexual term. It only makes them look like morons.
He meant “penetrate their network”, which is appropriate and not unreasonable.
I assume that is in response to my whimsical post. Sorry you consider me a moron.
The budget deal Obama will surely sign includes an even worse version of CISA. So totally fucked.
Even BooMan doesn’t get this.
None of Trump’s supporters are going to “see through” anything he says, ever, because in order to do that they’d have to be thinking in terms of television star “telling it like it is” (in an authoritarian voice and tone) to be [i]wrong[/i], and that’s never going to happen.
They would have to believe that things [i]really are[/i] complex and nuanced; they’d have to acknowledge that they don’t, actually, “see through” evolution or climate change or liberalism or any of the other “frauds” they’re being encouraged to dismiss out of hand. They’d need to be people who weren’t vulnerable to direct mail campaigns or televangelists or commercials; they would have to understand that actors aren’t actually “tough” or heroic or smart; they’d have to recognize that “the elite” — with their universities and museums and libraries — are actually on to something (rather than just arbitrarily elevating themselves and their cronies).
I’m not saying these people are stupid. Many of them are very smart. But, [i]culturally[/i], they’re not going to think of challenging Trump as something they’re “allowed” to do. He’s on television; they agree with his stance, the end.
“None of Trump’s supporters are going to “see through” anything he says, ever, because in order to do that they’d have to be thinking” You can end the sentence there. Trump’s appeal is not intellectual or even rational. It is emotional and vengeful. Like someone that Godwin says we can’t mention.
Seriously? This is what makes Donald Trump seem ridiculous?
Hollywood constantly depicts all kinds of fancy things that the normal police can do (like enhance low-resolution CCTV images to the point that you can read the screen of someone’s computer from looking in the mirror behind them) that are actually physically impossible, but how many people realize that it’s as fantastical as Star Trek’s transporter technology? In the real world, the NSA apparently set back Iran’s nuclear program by years with an internet-launched worm. How do you expect the average (young) person, a person who uses the internet on a daily basis but doesn’t deal with the details of technology, to see anything absurd in what Trump is saying? Hollywood tells us we can, and the NSA likes giving the impression that they are super-badass when it comes to cyber-warfare.
Any analysis that discusses Trump’s “policy positions” (such as they are) or even “the things he says” is missing the forest for the trees. It reminds me of something Stephen Colbert talked about in his old show: Trump doesn’t explain or articulate anything – he feels it at us. There are words, but it’s the feeling that he’s riding. We have this beautiful NSA that knows everything about everyone (not really), so why are they letting ISIS use Twitter? Or Facebook? It must be that feckless Obama! Penetrate the internets, dammit!
This is a man who said he, Donald Trump, would have “taken out” the shooters in Paris if he had been there. To me, that’s a level of absurdity that the average person should be able to understand is absolutely bonkers ridiculous. But not this. This is average sloganeering at the sophistication level of the average Trump supporter or Trump-curious supporter.
The content of Donald Trump’s word-constructions doesn’t matter; what matters is that Donald is voicing the same exasperation that many are feeling, and even if they know, deep down, that the things he says he’ll do can’t be done, they feel that he’ll try and that what he will end up doing will be done with the same gut they have. And that’s why he can say things they don’t agree with and still support him. They don’t believe the content of necessarily anything he says; they just trust the place he’s coming from. All successful politicians connect with people on this level, but with Trump, this is the only level he can really connect on because there’s not really anything else.
the internet is a series of tubes – a classic