Painfully Obvious.

Does this mean HuffPost will stop reporting on poll results? No, we will continue reporting them but treat them as lightweight diversions on par with horoscopes and political betting lines. To this end, we are introducing a new feature today: HuffPollstrology. It will keep you up to date on the latest poll results, along with the candidates’ latest horoscope predictions, the latest online political betting lines, and the latest weather forecasts for key primary states (and we know how accurate those often turn out to be!). Pollstrology is a great way to see who is hot and who is not — and which candidates’ stars say they might be lucky in voter love today.

I would love it if someone who objects to the feature could describe the path by which Microsoft could redeem itself. If they break backward compatibility, people will claim they’re evil. If they don’t implement the standards, people will claim they’re evil. Their existing features don’t comply with standards. The only way to maintain backward compatibility while altering existing features is through versioning. The standards bodies aren’t interested in versioning. Sounds kind of like a no win situation to me. So what should we do, point a revolver at their head and demand they pick sides?

[N]ext time you wonder why your toolkit of choice is built the way it is or why it’s even necessary, just remember that in many cases they are protecting you from a decade or more of bad decision making.

It is not our intent to eliminate debate or disagreement, but rather to programmatically enforce a certain quality of expression. Put another way: The StupidFilter will cheerfully approve an eloquent, properly‐capitalized defense of mandatory, state‐subsidized rocket‐launcher ownership for all schoolchildren.

There is a meme beginning to go around that he is vague and empty. If you do not know what Obama is proposing in many areas, it’s only because you don’t know how to use Google.

I’ve been working hard on RKelly lately. RKelly is a Ruby implementation of Kelly. Kelly is a fictional project that I made up so that I could name my project RKelly.

What [the Iowa Caucus] does is give the whip hand to the moneyed political professionals, to the full‐time party hacks and manipulators, to the shady pollsters and the cynical media boosters, and to the supporters of fringe and crackpot candidates… It is an absolutely terrible way in which to select candidates for the presidency, and it makes the United States look and feel like a banana republic both at home and overseas.

We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.

Six months in the jungle with Sean Penn [filming Casualties of War] is tricky, but he’s a real talented guy. I sent him a note at the end of it saying, “I can’t say that it was a pleasure, but it was a privilege.”

Unfortunately, to start this incremental rendering, Safari requires a kilobyte of data at the beginning of the stream. In Orbited, we use 100 tags for this. But at some point we’ll perhaps switch this to some tasteful ASCII art.