McCain Campaign Uses Spider/Diff Against Obama 1171
Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.
The Goods (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the goods from TFA:
The Friday, July 11 version of the page says:
"at great cost our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006."
The Monday, July 14 version spidered by Versionista says:
"Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military's hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families."
Who are you trying to fool? (Score:4, Informative)
This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks.
Are you kidding? The Republicans have been embarrassingly behind the times when it comes to IT stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole spider/diff issue came from some college Intern with initiative, working on his own.
Normally I'd say something positive to balance my post out, but this election is look god-awful for both parties. I just don't give a damn.
robots.txt? Goldmine! (Score:5, Informative)
robots.txt is idiotic in this context, except to steer spiders away from forms that shouldn't be submitted or triggering infinite loops. Suppose you find something like:
Don't you think that's going to be the first place to look? Again, robots.txt is to avoiding causing site meltdowns or stupid behavior. It's not to hide information.
Re:Who are you trying to fool? (Score:5, Informative)
"The Republicans" didn't do a damn thing that I'd call special or a new trick--they simply used an existing tool (and no, its not diff or any other command-line tool):
Versionista monitors Web sites that you specify for edits. Our Web-based service records every change, clearly highlighting added or deleted words and sentences.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
Not only that, but this is also Obama admitting that the surge worked, which McCain always pushed for...
Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Goods (Score:2, Informative)
Re:New Meme (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong interpretation of the word different. In this case, different referrs to 'different from previous results'. This requires some established results before hand -- that is, the dice would come up anything from 1 to 6. The crazy would be rolling them expecting that you will eventually get a 7. (assuming 6-sided die)
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Why not pencil in Powell as a candidate on the ballet?!
Because he was complicit in misleading the public into the Iraq war.
Re:worked ? (Score:2, Informative)
Such is the nature of this war. What I was referring to was this quote from the article:
"But military statistics released last week show that violence in the form of attacks, and the number of US casualties in Iraq, are now at a four year low. The attacks and casualties have plummeted from a peak in June 2007, according to those statistics."
And when did the surge start? From Wikipedia:
'June 15, 2007: The troop surge operations begin. The U.S. military reports that 28,000 troops required for the surge have arrived in Iraq and that the surge operations can now commence. "All the forces initially identified as part of the surge have completed their strategic movements into theatre in Iraq,"'
That's the date when the deaths started plummeting.
Re:New Meme (Score:1, Informative)
Not sure if you were just being funny or if you were trying to sneak bad logic in.
In case the latter is true - you wouldn't expect the resultant information on the dice to be the same in most situations, but in a completely controlled environment, if you rolled the dice exactly the same way, they should come up exactly the same in the exact same position. Now, that kind of control is impossible to expect, therefore dice have some inherent degree of randomness.
Now - the OP was also wrong in referring to that "definition of insanity", as the public perceptions are so easily molded. Just because it didn't work today, doesn't mean that it won't tomorrow, who knows what strange thing that people notice, what moronic chain e-mail goes around, what insipid advertisement will catch the public's eye and allow the old message to be received well.
These guys didn't get into this level of politics without knowing at least something about how to manipulate public opinion.
Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:4, Informative)
Robots.txt only exists if you want to direct the search engine spider/robot in some regard. If you just want the search engine spider/robot to do what it does naturally (crawl and file information away), then you don't need to have a robots.txt at all. I think the editor was concerned that it would be unethical for the McCain campaign to create a crawler that ignores robots.txt. So McCain's campaign's savvy was only "clever" if it wasn't cheating (by ignoring robots.txt). In this case, as you mention, there was no robots.txt, which means McCain had no need to cheat. And of course that is the case--certainly Obama wants his campaign website to be searchable by Google.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
You cut off your nose despite your face.
No, you cut off your nose to spite your face.
Re:New Meme (Score:2, Informative)
It's "cut off your nose to spite your face". At least you didn't use "you're".
:)
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Am I the only person who clicked on the link (hyperlink behind "Vote McCain in 2008". It takes you to McCain food services. It was a joke, folks.
Re:Why is updating your policy positions bad again (Score:5, Informative)
John McCain has had his share of flip flops [rawstory.com], as document in this Keith Olbermann clip. It's pretty hilarious because the clip ends by reading a statement from McCain that his viewpoints are evolving, and then noting that McCain was for evolution, and now against evolution. It is pretty well done.
A vote for POTUS is for far more than a POTUS (Score:4, Informative)
When you vote for president, you get far more than a president.
Behind the POTUS candidate comes a legion of people who will set the policy and tone of the nation for years to come. Supreme Court justices, Cabinet members, hundreds of others at every level of government.
Dont forget what happened at NASA, the EPA, the Justice Department, DHS, etc. All hit the headlines the last few years with major scandals brought on by POTUS-appointed bureaucrats.
Point being, presidential elections arent about single issues or a single candidate, but a change in national leadership for all issues at all levels. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and vote for the party most closely aligned with the future you desire. Any party will bring in some crazies, its unavoidable.
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Informative)
Qwest said "no".
Qwest actually said, "This is not what a warrant looks like; come back when you have a real warrant."
It was pretty much the most impressive piece of corporate ballsiness I can recall in recent history.
Re:the third parties are running idiots too..... (Score:5, Informative)
In Qwest's case, they said "no" and got fucked out of government contracts worth millions. Classified government contracts, too, so they couldn't directly tell their stockholders where all the fucking money went.
No wonder the other three went along.
Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dissonance (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, absolutely he's going to be a better choice - your cynicism aside, McCain is a demonstrably worse candidate than Obama on a variety of issues.
Re:Numbers? (Score:2, Informative)
Here: http://www.heritage.org/research/features/BudgetChartBook/fed-rev-spend-2008-boc-R3-Corporate-Income-Tax-Cuts-Boost.html [heritage.org]
Re:http://www.barackobama.com/robots.txt (Score:4, Informative)
So McCain's campaign's savvy was only "clever" if it wasn't cheating (by ignoring robots.txt).
Actually , his campaign was just using versionista.com; they're the clever ones, and McCain's campaign is just using their service like anyone else could.
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
The theory is based on the Laffer curve [wikipedia.org]. At a 0% tax rate, revenue will obviously be zero. At some arbitrarily high tax rate (100%? 1000%? 100,000%?), there's such a strong disincentive to earn money that revenue will also be zero. Given two zero crossings, you have an optimizable function of tax rate vs. revenue.
In short, some groups of intelligent people think that the tax rate is higher than the optimal value, and other intelligent people think it's lower than it should be. It's not inherently idiotic to imagine how tax cuts could in fact increase revenue.
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
You're being the idiot. Taxes are a balancing act. Move them too high and you stop consumption which then lowers overall revenue. People like to feel like they are getting value when they buy something. If you tax it so much that value is no longer noticed people quit buying things. If you lower them, then people can (and will) buy more stuff which increases revenue. It's not a hard concept to understand, and there are numbers to prove it.
Your analogy doesn't work. A better one is a company that sells some cool widget for $100. At $100 only 10 people buy it and make the company $1000. The widget is really cool and people want it, but they don't see the value at $100. So the company lowers the price to $10 and now sells 1,000 of the widgets and make the company $10,000. OMG, how did they make more money selling the widget for less??? Maybe they should give it away make infinite amounts of money. I know this is tough logic to follow, but sheesh...
Re:Jesse Ventura only serious contender I can supp (Score:2, Informative)
Everyone believes in UFOs, you nimrod. Anything in the sky you can't identify is a UFO.
About the only way to disbelieve in UFOs is to disbelieve that people might not know what they're seeing, that everyone has perfect knowledge of everything up there. Because otherwise it is clearly possible that people could see things in the sky they cannot identify.
Jimmy Carter does not, however, believe they are aliens. He's never suggested such, and in fact has very specifically stated he does not believe aliens have ever visited this planet. He believes it was a craft from a nearby military base.
I have no idea what you're talking about Clinton and Oswald. The only logical thing I can think of is that Clinton requested any documents from the Russians they had about the Kennedy assassination.
Which, if anything, demonstrates the opposite of what you said...that Clinton thought Oswald did it, working for the Russians. Or, alternately, he wanted to put the theory the Russians were involved to rest. Or, on the third hand, he just wanted to use the US's and Russia's new friendship to grab some documents for future historians. (There were a lot of such requests being made, in both directions, especially about pet conspiracy theories that the CIA or KGB had about their opposing organization's involvement in specific things.)
I can't imagine how you got 'He thinks Oswald didn't do it' out of that, but that's the only connection between him and Oswald I can even find.
Re:Numbers? (Score:3, Informative)
The point is, by letting the people have more money to do with what they want, they build commerce and increase federal coffers because people are spending more (which items purchased are taxed) and making more (expanding commerce), thus the increase of making more = more taxes.
Your point is noted in that lowering taxes too much will be of no use. However, the more you raise taxes, especially if the money is going into social programs, will only create a lazy, dependent society and commerce, and taxes, dies.
I wish I had mod points for XanC
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't argue that spending is out of control and something that should be slowed down a lot, but I have an issue with the tax cuts on the 'rich'*. The only places that taxes can be cut is on the rich* b/c they are the only ones paying taxes! From here [ustreas.gov]:
So when we cut taxes who else do you want to cut them on? Or are you talking more about income redistribution. The whole take money from those who have it and hand it out to those who don't?
* what defines 'rich'?
Re:Numbers? (Score:4, Informative)
The Heritage Foundation? You're joking, right?
Not that the linked graph isn't a brilliant piece of research, but let's be honest about the climate we're in. If I told you that the Center for American Progress [americanprogress.org] disagrees, would you care? Would you even take it seriously?
To be fair, your graph is based on data from the CBO, which was already Democrat-controlled when the report was released. On the other hand, it's without context. That is, how have domestic income tax receipts decreased in the same period?
Moreover, if you'll recall, we've experienced a general economic recovery since that time -- until relatively recently -- which may or may not be due to the tax cuts. (I think we can guess where each other's intuitions lie here.) There's no obvious reason to take the correlation between tax cuts and corporate income tax receipts as a causal indicator. Plenty of other options abound.
Re:Oblig. Futurama Ref. (Score:4, Informative)
...for certain definitions of "freedom", perhaps.
The original libertarians [blackened.net] were based around freedom. But a party that upholds an economic system based on government policies that concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a minority, backs a funny sort of "freedom".
Re:New Meme (Score:3, Informative)
So, how many times have you backed a third-party candidate? Has the result changed yet?
In 1992, Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote: not enough to win the election, but well within the margin of victory for either candidate. He finished second in two states.
It was a wake-up call for both parties. Deficit spending (one of Perot's pet issues) was reigned in. The Republicans crafted a "Contract for America" for the 1994 mid-term elections, some of which looked like it was copied almost verbatim from Perot's campaign platform. Subsequently, the Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress.
Historically, third parties in the US have succeeded by threatening the hegemony of the two major political parties and instead affect the behavior of BOTH parties. A notable exception: when the Republicans displaced the Whigs, ironically over the issue of slavery.
Re:New Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New Meme (Score:3, Informative)
"You cut off your nose despite your face"
I think you mean "You cut off your nose to spite your face."
OT: That's completely false and misleading. (Score:5, Informative)
Ugh. No. You're so wrong I don't know where to start.
Slavery is anathema to libertarian ideology, because it allows one person to impinge on the rights of another. That's a fundamentally Bad Thing; in fact the whole point of libertarianism is the maximization of personal freedom, up to the point where your freedom to do something starts impinging on someone else's.
Basically you've constructed a straw man and then proceeded to tear it down; congratulations. It's a good argument except that it has nothing to do with any actual libertarians that I've ever met, nor the positions of either the Libertarian party [lp.org] or the other similar state-level parties [lpnh.org].
If you want to criticize libertarian theory, that's fine -- there are many valid critiques of it. But saying that it advocates or legitimizes slavery is just false and stupid, and a great way of advertising your own ignorance.
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds (Score:2, Informative)
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. – 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' – Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emerson [wikiquote.org]
Re:mod what (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The Goods (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1823186,00.html?xid=rss-topstories [time.com]
Surge is over. Given how wrong you are on that I'd recommend everyone take the rest of what you say with a huge grain of salt.
Re:Numbers? (Score:5, Informative)
It's my understanding that tax cuts really do increase revenue,
The late, great Steve Kangas takes that myth on with statistics [huppi.com].
Re:New Meme (Score:3, Informative)
Until we change our voting system to something like Instant Runoff voting, the large parties will never be beaten because voting for a 3rd party really is throwing away your vote.
No, it really isn't. This is an infuriating bit of misinformation that needs to stop. The only thing that is throwing away your vote is not voting. Any vote, any vote at all, is not throwing your vote away. Period. More importantly, the only thing that keeps third parties from gaining power in this country is thinking like yours. We should get a different voting system, but barring that, people need to wake the fuck up and realize they're only shooting themselves in the foot by voting for "not that guy". Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
There is a logical reason [wikipedia.org] why people vote the way they do in our system. That's why we need a new system so badly. The problem is that those in power will do everything possible to discredit any system but ours and fight incredibly hard to prevent any change to the system that got them where they are. They know how to game the current system. Why would they want to change the rules?
Re:Lies about Libertarianism (Score:5, Informative)
Legal trespass has many exceptions
For instance, it's not trespass if a surveyor is going through your land. And it's not trespass if you're not home and your neighbors come on your property to fight a fire.
Many rules have exceptions. Advocating the Libertarian position doesn't mean that you'd throw common sense out of the window, on the contrary.
Re:Fascism (Score:3, Informative)
"You desperately need history classes."
I have a degree in it, thanks.
Recall that once Hitler and Mussolini gained power, they outlawed all opposing parties... and then murdered their opponents.
I don't recall Bush instituting one-party rule. I don't seem to recall Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid being sent to a concentration camp. I also seem to recall a peaceful transfer of power when his competitors won power in the Congress in 2006. No coup's in site.
May I dare suggest that, in addition to some reading of your own, you might need a little perspective.