well, if you look at it, a republic with a free market does tend to be the most natural thing so far... attempts to impose alternative societal structures haven't been so successful.. not that we'll try again in the future.
Many people seem to confuse innovation vs. invention. Invention is creating a new thing/technology. Innovation is sensing and successfully responding to a market need.
This article seems to forget that perhaps the most important innovations of recent times have been SOCIAL innovations.
Some good: FDR's GI bill of rights, which provided an entire generation of Americans with higher education, the Generally Accepted Tarriffs and Treaties (GATT, now WTO), which dramatically lowered global trade barriers in part to dissuade another world war
Some bad: Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism.
The age of innovation on the social level is just beginning.
no, it's RMI over CORBA
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 1
A requirement of the EJB 1.1 spec is that all RMI calls must go over RMI/IIOP.
RMI is just an interface.. the wire protocol mattered less once IIOP supported pass-by-value.
Re:More Idiotic Slashdot Devil's Advocacy
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 1
I think more people are sick of your B.S. than other people's.
LISP is a language that's over 40 years old, has been used widely, and only in recent times has become less popular.
CORBA is extremely widely adopted throughout various enterprises in the world -- way moreso than XML and SOAP are. Naturally, XML will probably eclipse this eventually, but probably NOT using SOAP.
Get YOUR facts straight before you launch a clueless rant.
Good philosophy: "doing more with less" -- but less of what?
What the market deems to be most expensive: Human effort.
Sorry, but I think you're way off base. By your argument we should still be hand-rolling assembly language programs.
We (as humans) don't have the cognitive capacity to make new levels of complex software unless we leverage abstraction and indirection to "stand on the shoulders of giants", so to speak - those who CAN specialize in writing protocols and compilers and languages.
Smalltalk has quite a lot of tools and history out there compared to Ruby, and arguably has more practical rollouts too (comparing an 18+ year old language to a 5 year old language isn't totally fair of course).
Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if most Smalltalk adherents migrate over to Ruby the next several years. Ruby is beautiful.
..and agree with ya. I started with a 300 baud modem in 1988 on a C64 and managed to see the rise of QLink -- back when it was cool -- it's morphing into AOL, and the rise and fall of BBS'. ran 2 BBS' too in the late 80's to mid 90's on the C64 then the PC.
it was like a different world. always something new to discover, the "underground" feeling, the politics of "fight-o-net", err FIDOnet, etc...
Chances are if you do any kind of online securities trading at a major brokerage (Schwab, ETrade, TD Waterhouse, DLJDirect, etc.), then your order is being touched by Java somewhere.
If you're using a VISA card, then chances are your transaction is being touched by Java somewhere.
If you buy anything at the Home Depot or any NIKE product, chances are, your transaction will be touched by Java.
If you work as a trader at any major brokerage, chances are that you're dealing with a Java system somewhere.
Java is producing results almost everywhere, and usually on the server. I think you really need to wipe the tint off your goggles.
Speaking of which, let's talk Smalltalk:
- Every major car manufacturer depends on it (Honda, Toyota, Ford, GM, Chrysler) for either backoffice systems or realtime production monitoring systems
- Several utilties (Florida P&L, Tokyo Electric, etc.) require it to monitor their powergrid and perform billing.
- Several nuclear facilities use it.
- The DoD uses it for their AEGIS military simulation system.
- Sprint's ION service is completely Smalltalk
- Several transportation/shipping companies depend on Smalltalk for their routing and logistics (little companies like FedEx and OOCL)
(Of course, C++ is running a lot of things too, no questions).
People who work digging ditches all day tend not to see that there's a world outside of the ditch.
Most IDE's suck.
But the best IDE's were the ones based on the Smalltalk or LISP idea of programming -- an interactive environment with many different views of your source code, with dependency analysis tools, and immediate feedback when attempting to write code (whether in a scrapbook/immediate window or as part of a class or form.)
Most of the add-ons to emacs are tools that provide features of the above nature.. The oo-browser, speedbar, the macros in JDE, a couple of dependency analyzers, etc. But even these tend not to be integrated so well as IBM VAJava or Cincom Smalltalk, or even IBM VAC++..
The higher level the language, and the more OO the language, the slower it runs and the more memory it takes up. That's a FACT.
LISP compilers in the mid-80's were known to compile faster code
than C compilers. (If you wrote optimized LISP code -- it was very easy not to.)
LISP is arguably more OO than any other language, so, I think you're confusing a "widely held opinion" with a "FACT".
The FACT is that dynamic, just-in-time compilation has the theoretical potential to be faster than low-level languages -- we just need to spend more time on compiler research for this to be a "mainstream" case.
First off, I very strongly disagree that you should reject a proprietary technology because O'Reilly doesn't have a book on it. First of all, having a book doesn't make it "open". Second of all, I agree you should put emphasis on more "published" technologies. BUT, there are many technologies that are *tremendous sources of competitive advantage* that have no major books out. Apple WebObjects, for example. Or object databases such as GemStone.
If your radar screen is limited to what everyone else sees, you're missing opportunities. That's okay for some, but not for me.
Now, as for training:
You're assuming that learning by yourself is faster than learning through training. I used to agree with you, but I don't so much anymore (partially because I train people now).
The underlying assumption here is that you're *NOT* learning anything from a trainer. Which is the exact opposite of what's supposed to be happening isn't it?
Think about it. You can't ask a book questions. A book doesn't guide you to the subtleties of what you're learning. A book also takes much longer to get you up and running with the basics, though it will give you a better foudational grounding than most training sessions.
The key to effective training is:
1) attendees have to pay as much attention to what is being taught as they would if they were reading a book / figuring it out for themselves
2) the trainer must be a good speaker and very knowledgable.
unfortunately 90% of the time, neither are true. People goof off, don't listen, AND they don't read books. Management sends them to training because they refuse to learn things on their own, and they learn nothing anyway, so training gets a bad rap.
On the other hand, for those that DO care and DO read, they usually are stuck with a trainer that knows nothing and isn't even a remotely engaging speaker. Training gets a deserved bad rap in this case...
so as always, the problem comes down to people. good people make all the difference... if you have good people, then the o'reilly book approach will work wonders. BUT couple that with a good trainer, and I think you'd be pleasantly surprised with the results.
I should add:
3) classrooms are only a small part of training. learning is about retention. You can only get that through one-on-one mentoring. use the classroom for the basics, and mentor key team members afterwards. Then they can act as mentors to their peers.
Do you realize that if *local telephone service* were a regulated by a free market that we'd have chaos?
Effectively, the regions that are attempting deregulation of local utlities are enjoying quite a bit of price RAISING.
The problem with competition & the free market is that it works in the macro, but has a difficult time providing "standards of service" in the micro. It's all at the whim of the market -- but most of all (and this is the kicker) -- while in the end the market WILL make things better -- IT TAKES TOO freaking long.
Is this acceptable? Sorry. People need problems solved now. If that interrupts the utopian neo-classical view, so be it. "In the long run, we are all dead" - JMK.
Netscape 6 is the perfect example of why "blanket rewrites" never work out the way you intend them to.
First of all, let me say that I'm so far moderately impressed with NS 6. I've seen the prior PR releases and Mozilla builds, and this actually looks and feels like a "release" quality product. I always felt the Mozilla and PR releases just plainly sucked for polish and buginess. For NS 6, Netscape has done a tremendous polish job , and I'm very surprised they released it this early with this level of quality.
Now, having said that, their polish job wasn't nearly enough for this to be a *great* release. Rewriting a product is *always* chasing a moving target... and requires bug fix after requirements change after headache after political battle... ad nauseum.
The worst thing about rewrites is that usually developers are screaming for *another* rewrite by the time the rewrite is finished, because it has already begun to rot. I really, really, hope this isn't the case with NS 6.
The aftermath of this release is going to be:
- The impatient ones (i.e. 70% of web users) are going scream murder at Netscape's incompetence at releasing so many bugs. (ignoring that Linux 2.4 is over a year late, Netscape 6 is now around 1.5 years late, etc.)
- The slightly patient ones (leftovers, i.e. me) will be somewhat disappointed, but hopeful based on initial experience.
They really have to placate that last crowd. And if the code isn't clean, there's no time for another rewrite. If the majority of quirks aren't fixed in short order (i.e. Netscape 6.1 within 6 months), Netscape will probably remain a niche browser for UNIX platforms, while Windows and Mac users remain with IE. IE is just too good of a product now to choose not to use it for purely "but it's Microsoft" reasons.
For now I'm going to stick with NS 6 to get used to it more. At first I almost gave up on NS 6 really quickly for odd quirks, but they somehow cleared up after I rebooted my machine. (Go figure). Anyway.
1. I have broadband both at home, and at work. Furthermore, I'm in Japan. I began downloading the Mac version this morning while in the shower, and 12 minutes later, it was done. This from an asia-pacific server. Later in the day, I downloaded the Windows version at work, and it took around 15 minutes. That's not that bad, considering it's around 25 megs and there are lots of people getting it.
2. 1/3 the load up speed of IE 5.5? Hmm. That's a bit of an exagerration by my experience. Unless you have IE 5.5 pre-loaded in memory...
3. What's unintuitive about the interface? It's just like every other version of Netscape -- just prettier.. the side bar is pretty much the same as what IE 5 on the Macintosh has.
My UI complaints right now are:
- Some themes seem to lack quality control. The "mozzilion modern" theme, for instance, has redraw problems with the scroll bars.
- the radio button controls have redraw problems. When I click on them, they sometimes disappear
- mouseover() events in Javascript are dog slow and cause this funny "white trailing line" if I scroll across a typical web page menu that uses them. Go see http://developer.bea.com for an example.
4. Haven't used the mail/news module enough yet, but right now I do like Outlook Express (especially the Mac version).
As for what "open source" can do, I think you're being a closed-minded troll. It's not about open or closed source, it's about trying to do something completely different -- and then having to ship it. There's always teething problems with a 1.0 release.
Am I 100% pleased with NS6? Not at all.. but they didn't blow it for me.. yet. I've been using IE for over 2 years now but I'll switch back to NS 6 in the interim.
I guess the sad thing (for you, that is) is that Java is actually improving.. You, know, getting faster, more powerful and stuff, instead of just spewing hot air (though their marketing department does a bit of that too).
JDK 1.3 was a major win in performance and reliability. JDK 1.4 is targetted at the same goals.
The problem of JSP's causing gucky HTML pages is something I think we're going to have to recognize as unavoidable.. The world of dynamic page generation has two options:
1) Put your HTML in your code (Perl, CGI, servlets, etc)
2) Put your code in your HTML (ASP, JSP, PHP)
I think it's a trade-off on a case-per-case basis.
And don't forget that JSP's tag libraries *really* clean things up if used properly. (They're quite new though)..
Metallica always, even to this day, has allowed and encouraged bootlegs of live material.
They have *never* encouraged bootlegs of master tapes. This is similar to the policy the Grateful Dead had.
Metallica isn't concerned with their profits, as Lars has repeatedly said. They're concerned that their works are now effectively out of their span of control -- that any one can distribute works in progress like "I Disappear" and master tapes, and they have no say in the process. It's cutting the artist out of the way they may want their works distriubted. That's not about profits -- it's about influence, control, and power.
They're whining about the piracy of their own works because they have the right to control their work -- and the majority of Americans WANT them to have that right.
The Napster supporters, in their narcissistic zeal, want the power to control all intellectual works. The artists don't generally agree with that.
I think that widespread digital distribution of music is inevitable, but I also think that Napster isn't the appropriate way to do that until artists can retain their control and fair share of the profits.
"I'm glad Apple's stock went down"? Rob, you're getting more disconnected from reality as the days go on....and I've been here a long time.. (look at my user number)
So, if I posted a message that said "I really disagree with Slashdot's political agenda -- serves them right that Andover.net's stock went down", what would happen? Score -1, flamebait.
I love Slashdot lots, which is why I stay. But your editorial bias is hurting the very foundation of what made this place successful in the past: diversity of opinion. You're gradually pushing away anyone that doesn't agree with the counter-cultural anti-IP, anti-government, anti-corporate movement. Soon this place is going to be one homogenous pot of "yes men" who once had a chance to influence the world but became so out of touch with reality that the rest of the world won't listen.
note that I didn't say "reagan did it" nor did I say that "clinton had nothing to do with the economy".
Reagan's tax cuts had an effect on the economy, yes, but my reference was to the balooning deficit that resulted from those cuts. It was unmaintainable -- it had to be balanced. The government managed to pull this off, but I really don't know if I believe that it was *because* of Clinton.
Big-L libertarianism is probably generally wrong as it tends to look more like anarchy than a political system.
Small-l libertarianism ala Milton Freedman or Robert Nozick does seem to have very redeeming qualities, and I'm not so sure that you could find any major faults with the arguments (unless you're a die-hard egalitarian)....
Uh, yes, we would have a budget surplus with out him.... It was pretty much inevitable given the state of the budget after 12 years of Reaganomics and the economic upswing of the 1990's.
Slashdot Mirror
better question: why don't you have the self esteem or skills that would enable you not to CARE if a company fires you?
oh, I forgot, the pain of being a vitriolic cynic is less than the pain of being an acheiver...
well, if you look at it, a republic with a free market does tend to be the most natural thing so far... attempts to impose alternative societal structures haven't been so successful.. not that we'll try again in the future.
Many people seem to confuse innovation vs. invention. Invention is creating a new thing/technology. Innovation is sensing and successfully responding to a market need.
This article seems to forget that perhaps the most important innovations of recent times have been SOCIAL innovations.
Some good: FDR's GI bill of rights, which provided an entire generation of Americans with higher education, the Generally Accepted Tarriffs and Treaties (GATT, now WTO), which dramatically lowered global trade barriers in part to dissuade another world war
Some bad: Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism.
The age of innovation on the social level is just beginning.
A requirement of the EJB 1.1 spec is that all RMI calls must go over RMI/IIOP.
RMI is just an interface.. the wire protocol mattered less once IIOP supported pass-by-value.
I think more people are sick of your B.S. than other people's.
LISP is a language that's over 40 years old, has been used widely, and only in recent times has become less popular.
CORBA is extremely widely adopted throughout various enterprises in the world -- way moreso than XML and SOAP are. Naturally, XML will probably eclipse this eventually, but probably NOT using SOAP.
Get YOUR facts straight before you launch a clueless rant.
Good philosophy: "doing more with less" -- but less of what?
What the market deems to be most expensive: Human effort.
Sorry, but I think you're way off base. By your argument we should still be hand-rolling assembly language programs.
We (as humans) don't have the cognitive capacity to make new levels of complex software unless we leverage abstraction and indirection to "stand on the shoulders of giants", so to speak - those who CAN specialize in writing protocols and compilers and languages.
Go back to making your fire with flint...
If you're good, they don't care.
Trust me on this.
Only HR departments care about degrees because they have to weed out the "good from the bad".
If you're going through the HR department, you're not good enough yet.
Smalltalk has quite a lot of tools and history out there compared to Ruby, and arguably has more practical rollouts too (comparing an 18+ year old language to a 5 year old language isn't totally fair of course).
Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if most Smalltalk adherents migrate over to Ruby the next several years. Ruby is beautiful.
..and agree with ya. I started with a 300 baud modem in 1988 on a C64 and managed to see the rise of QLink -- back when it was cool -- it's morphing into AOL, and the rise and fall of BBS'. ran 2 BBS' too in the late 80's to mid 90's on the C64 then the PC.
it was like a different world. always something new to discover, the "underground" feeling, the politics of "fight-o-net", err FIDOnet, etc...
Chances are if you do any kind of online securities trading at a major brokerage (Schwab, ETrade, TD Waterhouse, DLJDirect, etc.), then your order is being touched by Java somewhere.
If you're using a VISA card, then chances are your transaction is being touched by Java somewhere.
If you buy anything at the Home Depot or any NIKE product, chances are, your transaction will be touched by Java.
If you work as a trader at any major brokerage, chances are that you're dealing with a Java system somewhere.
Java is producing results almost everywhere, and usually on the server. I think you really need to wipe the tint off your goggles.
Speaking of which, let's talk Smalltalk:
- Every major car manufacturer depends on it (Honda, Toyota, Ford, GM, Chrysler) for either backoffice systems or realtime production monitoring systems
- Several utilties (Florida P&L, Tokyo Electric, etc.) require it to monitor their powergrid and perform billing.
- Several nuclear facilities use it.
- The DoD uses it for their AEGIS military simulation system.
- Sprint's ION service is completely Smalltalk
- Several transportation/shipping companies depend on Smalltalk for their routing and logistics (little companies like FedEx and OOCL)
(Of course, C++ is running a lot of things too, no questions).
People who work digging ditches all day tend not to see that there's a world outside of the ditch.
Most IDE's suck.
But the best IDE's were the ones based on the Smalltalk or LISP idea of programming -- an interactive environment with many different views of your source code, with dependency analysis tools, and immediate feedback when attempting to write code (whether in a scrapbook/immediate window or as part of a class or form.)
Most of the add-ons to emacs are tools that provide features of the above nature.. The oo-browser, speedbar, the macros in JDE, a couple of dependency analyzers, etc. But even these tend not to be integrated so well as IBM VAJava or Cincom Smalltalk, or even IBM VAC++..
Stu
The higher level the language, and the more OO the language, the slower it runs and the more memory it takes up. That's a FACT.
LISP compilers in the mid-80's were known to compile faster code
than C compilers. (If you wrote optimized LISP code -- it was very easy not to.)
LISP is arguably more OO than any other language, so, I think you're confusing a "widely held opinion" with a "FACT".
The FACT is that dynamic, just-in-time compilation has the theoretical potential to be faster than low-level languages -- we just need to spend more time on compiler research for this to be a "mainstream" case.
First off, I very strongly disagree that you should reject a proprietary technology because O'Reilly doesn't have a book on it. First of all, having a book doesn't make it "open". Second of all, I agree you should put emphasis on more "published" technologies. BUT, there are many technologies that are *tremendous sources of competitive advantage* that have no major books out. Apple WebObjects, for example. Or object databases such as GemStone.
If your radar screen is limited to what everyone else sees, you're missing opportunities. That's okay for some, but not for me.
Now, as for training:
You're assuming that learning by yourself is faster than learning through training. I used to agree with you, but I don't so much anymore (partially because I train people now).
The underlying assumption here is that you're *NOT* learning anything from a trainer. Which is the exact opposite of what's supposed to be happening isn't it?
Think about it. You can't ask a book questions. A book doesn't guide you to the subtleties of what you're learning. A book also takes much longer to get you up and running with the basics, though it will give you a better foudational grounding than most training sessions.
The key to effective training is:
1) attendees have to pay as much attention to what is being taught as they would if they were reading a book / figuring it out for themselves
2) the trainer must be a good speaker and very knowledgable.
unfortunately 90% of the time, neither are true. People goof off, don't listen, AND they don't read books. Management sends them to training because they refuse to learn things on their own, and they learn nothing anyway, so training gets a bad rap.
On the other hand, for those that DO care and DO read, they usually are stuck with a trainer that knows nothing and isn't even a remotely engaging speaker. Training gets a deserved bad rap in this case...
so as always, the problem comes down to people. good people make all the difference... if you have good people, then the o'reilly book approach will work wonders. BUT couple that with a good trainer, and I think you'd be pleasantly surprised with the results.
I should add:
3) classrooms are only a small part of training. learning is about retention. You can only get that through one-on-one mentoring. use the classroom for the basics, and mentor key team members afterwards. Then they can act as mentors to their peers.
Do you realize that if *local telephone service* were a regulated by a free market that we'd have chaos?
Effectively, the regions that are attempting deregulation of local utlities are enjoying quite a bit of price RAISING.
The problem with competition & the free market is that it works in the macro, but has a difficult time providing "standards of service" in the micro. It's all at the whim of the market -- but most of all (and this is the kicker) -- while in the end the market WILL make things better -- IT TAKES TOO freaking long.
Is this acceptable? Sorry. People need problems solved now. If that interrupts the utopian neo-classical view, so be it. "In the long run, we are all dead" - JMK.
Netscape 6 is the perfect example of why "blanket rewrites" never work out the way you intend them to.
... ad nauseum.
First of all, let me say that I'm so far moderately impressed with NS 6. I've seen the prior PR releases and Mozilla builds, and this actually looks and feels like a "release" quality product. I always felt the Mozilla and PR releases just plainly sucked for polish and buginess. For NS 6, Netscape has done a tremendous polish job , and I'm very surprised they released it this early with this level of quality.
Now, having said that, their polish job wasn't nearly enough for this to be a *great* release. Rewriting a product is *always* chasing a moving target... and requires bug fix after requirements change after headache after political battle
The worst thing about rewrites is that usually developers are screaming for *another* rewrite by the time the rewrite is finished, because it has already begun to rot. I really, really, hope this isn't the case with NS 6.
The aftermath of this release is going to be:
- The impatient ones (i.e. 70% of web users) are going scream murder at Netscape's incompetence at releasing so many bugs. (ignoring that Linux 2.4 is over a year late, Netscape 6 is now around 1.5 years late, etc.)
- The slightly patient ones (leftovers, i.e. me) will be somewhat disappointed, but hopeful based on initial experience.
They really have to placate that last crowd. And if the code isn't clean, there's no time for another rewrite. If the majority of quirks aren't fixed in short order (i.e. Netscape 6.1 within 6 months), Netscape will probably remain a niche browser for UNIX platforms, while Windows and Mac users remain with IE. IE is just too good of a product now to choose not to use it for purely "but it's Microsoft" reasons.
For now I'm going to stick with NS 6 to get used to it more. At first I almost gave up on NS 6 really quickly for odd quirks, but they somehow cleared up after I rebooted my machine. (Go figure). Anyway.
1. I have broadband both at home, and at work. Furthermore, I'm in Japan. I began downloading the Mac version this morning while in the shower, and 12 minutes later, it was done. This from an asia-pacific server. Later in the day, I downloaded the Windows version at work, and it took around 15 minutes. That's not that bad, considering it's around 25 megs and there are lots of people getting it.
2. 1/3 the load up speed of IE 5.5? Hmm. That's a bit of an exagerration by my experience. Unless you have IE 5.5 pre-loaded in memory...
3. What's unintuitive about the interface? It's just like every other version of Netscape -- just prettier.. the side bar is pretty much the same as what IE 5 on the Macintosh has.
My UI complaints right now are:
- Some themes seem to lack quality control. The "mozzilion modern" theme, for instance, has redraw problems with the scroll bars.
- the radio button controls have redraw problems. When I click on them, they sometimes disappear
- mouseover() events in Javascript are dog slow and cause this funny "white trailing line" if I scroll across a typical web page menu that uses them. Go see http://developer.bea.com for an example.
4. Haven't used the mail/news module enough yet, but right now I do like Outlook Express (especially the Mac version).
As for what "open source" can do, I think you're being a closed-minded troll. It's not about open or closed source, it's about trying to do something completely different -- and then having to ship it. There's always teething problems with a 1.0 release.
Am I 100% pleased with NS6? Not at all.. but they didn't blow it for me.. yet. I've been using IE for over 2 years now but I'll switch back to NS 6 in the interim.
No, specifically it is the "Imported IE Favorites" folder that doesn't seem to be draggable. Hrm.
100ms per function call, eh? nice troll.
I guess the sad thing (for you, that is) is that Java is actually improving.. You, know, getting faster, more powerful and stuff, instead of just spewing hot air (though their marketing department does a bit of that too).
JDK 1.3 was a major win in performance and reliability. JDK 1.4 is targetted at the same goals.
The problem of JSP's causing gucky HTML pages is something I think we're going to have to recognize as unavoidable.. The world of dynamic page generation has two options:
1) Put your HTML in your code (Perl, CGI, servlets, etc)
2) Put your code in your HTML (ASP, JSP, PHP)
I think it's a trade-off on a case-per-case basis.
And don't forget that JSP's tag libraries *really* clean things up if used properly. (They're quite new though)..
sorry, the green -> native threads thing just made my day. Thank you. :)
Metallica always, even to this day, has allowed and encouraged bootlegs of live material.
They have *never* encouraged bootlegs of master tapes. This is similar to the policy the Grateful Dead had.
Metallica isn't concerned with their profits, as Lars has repeatedly said. They're concerned that their works are now effectively out of their span of control -- that any one can distribute works in progress like "I Disappear" and master tapes, and they have no say in the process. It's cutting the artist out of the way they may want their works distriubted. That's not about profits -- it's about influence, control, and power.
They're whining about the piracy of their own works because they have the right to control their work -- and the majority of Americans WANT them to have that right.
The Napster supporters, in their narcissistic zeal, want the power to control all intellectual works. The artists don't generally agree with that.
I think that widespread digital distribution of music is inevitable, but I also think that Napster isn't the appropriate way to do that until artists can retain their control and fair share of the profits.
"I'm glad Apple's stock went down"? Rob, you're getting more disconnected from reality as the days go on. ...and I've been here a long time.. (look at my user number)
So, if I posted a message that said "I really disagree with Slashdot's political agenda -- serves them right that Andover.net's stock went down", what would happen? Score -1, flamebait.
I love Slashdot lots, which is why I stay. But your editorial bias is hurting the very foundation of what made this place successful in the past: diversity of opinion. You're gradually pushing away anyone that doesn't agree with the counter-cultural anti-IP, anti-government, anti-corporate movement. Soon this place is going to be one homogenous pot of "yes men" who once had a chance to influence the world but became so out of touch with reality that the rest of the world won't listen.
note that I didn't say "reagan did it" nor did I say that "clinton had nothing to do with the economy".
Reagan's tax cuts had an effect on the economy, yes, but my reference was to the balooning deficit that resulted from those cuts. It was unmaintainable -- it had to be balanced. The government managed to pull this off, but I really don't know if I believe that it was *because* of Clinton.
Big-L libertarianism is probably generally wrong as it tends to look more like anarchy than a political system.
Small-l libertarianism ala Milton Freedman or Robert Nozick does seem to have very redeeming qualities, and I'm not so sure that you could find any major faults with the arguments (unless you're a die-hard egalitarian)....
Uh, yes, we would have a budget surplus with out him.... It was pretty much inevitable given the state of the budget after 12 years of Reaganomics and the economic upswing of the 1990's.