What are you talking about? Could you please substantiate your claim with specific examples?
I'm not the original poster, but I'll take a stab at a quick example since I agree that Eclipse is unintuitive. Why do I have to double-click an editor's window decoration to make the side panel where the component tree is stored visible? In fact, to me, Eclipse has so many crappy little windows that it is painful to figure out what they contain and how to navigate between them and how to find them again when I inadvertantly make one of them go away.
Have you considered that maybe you were doing something wrong? What about Eclipse-- it looks pretty much the same (and correct) to me in both GNOME and Windows.
And if a widget doesn't exist on a particular platform, you are screwed. Try printing from Eclipse on GTK/Linux:
Bug 24796If GTK doesn't not have support for printing we are afraid that there will be no print support for SWT-GTK port. But Unix printing does not work the way it does on Windows. Dialog boxes are not required since Unix generally uses lpr with pipes to various filters. So here we have a case of the IDE developers refusing to implement a required feature in their IDE because they believe that the underlying platform (GTK) should conform to them rather than the other way around.
But then I've never understood what an IDE offers that isn't trivial to do using emacs, a shell, make, and a debugger. Maybe, an IDE with a form layout tool is useful and I haven't tried any of the Eclipse offerings in this area. I was quite disappointed with the Omando (sp?) UML tool. It crashed my Eclipse more often than not whenever I tried to use it.
Which points up another problem with Eclipse. I predict that it will descend into dll (jar) hell sometime soon. Each plugin will insist upon certain versions of jars and each tool vendor will screw up some other vendor by installing some common jar whose version is incompatible with the other tool's needs.
A notary is Govt sponsored too....just so you know. Actually, it makes lots of sense to have a certified email...If it registered and verified delivery to the server then it would be just like mail..
Verifying delivery of email to a server isn't very meaningful if the server has spam filters that could potentially toss it. A real delivery verification process would require a user to digitally sign the return receipt.
remember meatspace mail is legal even if you don't take it from your mailbox...You're legally obligated to take it out and read it.
I doubt that. If this were truly the case, most of us would be in legal trouble given the amount of junk mail we toss every day.
I really don't understand the point of the BSD licence at all. Seriously, I mean it, WTF is the point? If you are going to argue for that sort of "free" then arent you really saying that people should just renounce their copyright and dump their code into the public domain?
One Word: Liability.
It is not clear that releasing code into the public domain (whatever that really means) gets you off the hook if someone incorporates it into another product and it then blows up their nuclear reactor, shoots an airliner out of the sky, or steals their wife. The BSD license is the author's way of saying "Sure, you can use it as you please, you just can't sue me if it doesn't work the way you expected."
That's why there's Duplo. My 1 year old son loves them. I build things, he chews on them. Once he gets past the put-everything-in-the-mouth stage, he'll graduate to real legos.
There is an intermediate stage: You build something, kid laughs like a fiend while he/she tears down what you just built for them.
Now that's what Lego should have done: Combine your cars with Mindstorms and run a mini-battlebots tv show. That would have been a battlebots competition that most people could actually afford to enter.
But the truth is, people don't want to choose, they want you to choose for them.
In other words, because you don't want to make choices, the rest of should be offered choices either. You speak only for yourself, please stop pretending that you know what "people" want. Many of us do want to be able to explore alternative ways of doing things and are very appreciative of those who provide the alternatives.
ips are often assigned based on the network card's physical addr. Some cards have setup software that allows you to change this number. Try changing it, restart your dhcp client and see if the tcp/ip addr has changed. Set it back and see if you get your old tcp/ip addr back. RR in Columbus seems to work this way. When I have installed a new firewall, just moving the old network card to the new machine lets me keep the old tcp/ip addr.
The thing that worries me more is sexism in the Indian developer pool. I don't think I've ever seen a female indian developer, and I deal regularly with indian development teams and have noted that the male Indian developers "work to rule" with a female supervisor (catastrophic for software development, as it's the developers who spot niggling bugs), whereas they'll be helpful towards a male supervisor.
I've worked with many Indian women programmers. Even had an Indian woman boss with a PhD. I think the sex ratio between Indian men/women programmers is comparable to the US ratio.
As to the US, my dad started programming in the 1950s and noticed an influx of women into programming in the 1970s. His theory was that while most jobs have a sex asociated with them (construction workers are men, teachers and nurses are women), programming was too new to have aquired that baggage which made it easier for women to choose that profession.
But lets get a little real here about the state of the Indian university system; at best, it's grade 13.
This probably explains why so few IIT grads have been accepted into graduate school at places such as MIT, Cal Tech, or Berkeley as well as why IIT campuses rank lower in quality than nearly every other university in Asia. NOT!
Well, it depends on what objective is being pursued. If we're looking to ensure that the races are represented in universities, management and government proportinately to their representation in the general population, then yes, Affirmative Action has been very successful. If, on the other hand, the objective is to ensure that those positions are filled by the most qualified candidates, then Affirmative Action is a monumental step in the wrong direction. By creating artificial incentives for universities, corporations and government to give preference to certain races, we have removed the ability of these organizations to select the most objectively qualified candidate to fill an opening or contract.
Most universities have never had the ability to select the most objectively qualified candidates. Many slots at top universities are filled based on legacy. If your dad graduated from Harvard, it is much easier for you to get in than many better qualified candidates.
And we are seeing afirmative action in sports. NFL teams had better be able to explain to the NFL Commissioner why they made no effort to interview African-Americans for head coaching jobs.
Apologies for the AC post, but I've found that open discourse on such subjects tends to be shouted down as racism. Still, some things need to be said.
You are probably not racist. You are simultaneously idealistic about how things should be and naive about how things are and what it will take to get from what we have to what we all want:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
India is a caste-based society. In recent times, the lower castes have been throwing their weight around in their legislature.
The caste system is breaking down fast. We adopted a little girl from India recently. Used to be that adoption was unheard of in India because you could never be sure which caste the child came from. But there has been quite an upsurge in adoptions by Indian parents in the last decade. This breakdown, though, is mostly a middle class urban phenomena. While there is a large in absolute numbers middle class in India, it is still only a moderate percentage of the entire population. Rural areas are still a bastion of the caste system, but these are not the folks doing software development.
Because of this type of (reverse) discrimination, many upper caste individuals of means leave the country to obtain education and work elsewhere. While India is a big country, the trend is concerning, and western outsourcers should be aware of it.
This isn't a trend, and I doubt it should be of real concern to western companies desiring to hire Indian programmers. India has had a discriminatory university admissions policy for at least 30 years. This issue was being fought out 20 years ago when I made my first trip to India. It is still being fought over and will continue to be fought over just as race based admissions policies are being fought over in the US. Doesn't seem to have hurt India much. Just look at the growth rates they have had since Rajiv Ghandi began to liberalise Indian economic policies in the 1980s.
I'd guess that the very best Indian students come to the US to study and work for the same reasons that many other non-USians do: the US has some of the very best universities and great job opportunities for highly skilled talented individuals. If there is a trend, it is in the opposite direction. Indians who did well here in the US are moving capital back to India, starting new companies, and donating to universities there.
It is not the cops' or the DA's job to prosecute people infringining copyright.
Then why do commercial videos/dvds start out with an FBI warning about infringement?
You people that think the cops don't have better things to do than run around chasing overwieght middle aged guys with camcorders and middle school kids with cable modems need to get your heads out of your motherfucking asses and take notice as to just how much the "law" and government have impeded where it doesn't belong over the last half century.
The cops probably won't be involved in something like this but maybe once every decade or so. As to the impedement, Gov't laws and regs come and go. Used to be all kinds of laws about what was legal to do on a Sunday. They're mostly gone now. Several industries that had been tightly regulated were dereg'd in the 1970s and 80s under Carter and then Regean. The balance will eventually tip back on these types of laws too.
BTW. I live in Ohio and don't understand why anyone would care one way or the other about this law. News for Nerds? Yawn, must be a Sunday.
The US maintains detailed war plans for thousands of scenarios. The length of time for preparing for war in Afghanistan vs Iraq was based on the type of and quantity of troops required. No tanks were used in Afghanistan. Moving the multi-ton M1 beheamoths used in Iraq into position takes a lot of time.
Next time find a real source who understands military logistics instead of getting your info from the Iraqi Minister of Information.
And you can thank the britshit for this. Before they lay their dirty hands on India, everyone there lived together. Now, it's three different countries who hate each other's guts.
Bullshit. Go read any basic history of the sub-continent. I'll give you a quick synopsis: From day 1, India has been composed of lots of little Hindu statelets usually ruled by petty kings who coveted each other's territory. This was followed by multiple invasions of Muslims who continued the pattern. Except that now they had Muslim petty kings fighting Hindu petty kings as well as each other. Once in a while, some petty king managed to rise to the status of a great king (e.g. Ashoka or Shah Jehan). Then the Brits came. Now you had lots of petty kings kept in check by yet another foreign power. Then the Brits left. Petty kings are out of fashion so now the sub-continent has a mixture of petty democrats and petty generals running things. And it won't do any good to shoot the current petty king. They'll just find another. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Re:This is THE most irresponsible post I have ever
on
XFree86 Core Team Disbands
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yea, like most CIOs get their tech, political, and business news from/. You grossly overestimate/.'s influence.
Like it or not the economy is nothing more then converting natural resources into money. Natural resources are finite therefore it's a zero sum game.
Nonsense. What if we convert natural resources into capital goods that can then be substituted for the natural resources? You are making the same mistake that the classical economists made. You assume that the economy must use fixed ratios of capital, labor, and natural resources in its production function. But technology growth makes it easier and easier to produce more using higher ratios of capital to natural resources. The past 400 years of steady growth show that the economy is far from a zero sum game.
One of the fundamental tenets of contemporary capitalism is unlimited, never-ending economic growth as the keystone of prosperity. Unfortunately, no matter how little pollution you produce or how few resources you consume to fulfill the standard of living, you are eventually going to run out of SOMETHING. You can't grow forever.
And why not? Why can't productivity and technological growth guarantee ever higher standards of living? I'm an economist by training and I understand that TANSTAAFL. But that is a static concept. It says nothing about the economies long term prospects.
The founders of capitalism never took into account the impact of their theories would have on the global environment because they presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc.
Er, the founders of capitalism had no theories themselves, per se. They were just trying to get rich. But there was a theory that described what the factory owners were doing. It was first described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Karl Marx, Robert Malthus, and David Ricardo each contributed to it. That theory, known as classical economics today, does, in fact, take account of the effects of humans on the environment. Malthus famously worried so much about this that even today we talk about Malthusian catastrophies where human population growth outstrips resource limits.
Problem was, they were mostly all wrong. Smith based his theories on the notion that economic value was based on the amount of labor that went into the production of a good. His production function (the amount of output as a function of the quantity of inputs) was based on the idea that labor and capital had to be used in a fixed ratio to produce larger amounts of output. But it is obvious to us today that it is usually possible to substitute between labor and capital. Smith also missed out on the notion of productivity gains where the same quantities of inputs could produce
larger amounts of output through time.
It is this last one that is where hope lies. For the last 400 years, we have steadily increased the productivity and standard of living of, at least, those people living in the developed nations. No reason I can think of to assume technology advances won't continue. And if they do, they may well render the whole problem of global warming irrelevent. Either new tech is found that scrubs CO2 from the air at a reasonable cost (maybe some kind of super tree) or new tech is found that provides cheap energy without releasing CO2 (fusion?).
I've never understood either the greens or the far right. Why can't I have cheap energy, a high standard of living, and a clean environment?
Wasn't just the old map makers. Printers who calculated and printed tables of logarithms, trig functions, and other assorted ilk would do the same thing in order to be able to sue competitors who copied their books.
... 2) the trend of reducing unemployment reversed towards higher unemployment in the time around the 2000 election, where Bush Jr. policies were not yet in place.
Bush policies began to be put into place during the last 2 years of Clinton's final term. We had a Republican Congress and a lame duck President. IIRC, the first of Bush's massive tax cuts was passed before Clinton left office.
Software development is a hard and tedious job. If you're not prepared to stick to the tedious process, then there are much fewer jobs available to you.
Disagree. Those parts of any job that are tedious are ripe for automation. Javadoc and doxygen are classic examples where much of the tedium of producing documentation has been automated leaving the creative part (the wordsmithing) alone.
Yes, lots of them. Airline mechanics and pilots are a good example.
Government employees are usually members. (Don't laugh. Government employees include NASA and Ames and Los Alamos and the like, most of whose researchers are Union.)
Bzzzt. The researchers at places like Los Alamos and ORNL are not unionized. They are treated more like university professors with the exception that there is no tenure available. The tradesmen who build the bomb parts at Y-12 along with the cafeteria workers, on the other hand, are unionized. Generally, those with university degrees who work for the contractor (Univ of Tenn, Univ of CA, Batelle, etc.) are not unionized at DOE facilities.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? Could you please substantiate your claim with specific examples?
I'm not the original poster, but I'll take a stab at a quick example since I agree that Eclipse is unintuitive. Why do I have to double-click an editor's window decoration to make the side panel where the component tree is stored visible? In fact, to me, Eclipse has so many crappy little windows that it is painful to figure out what they contain and how to navigate between them and how to find them again when I inadvertantly make one of them go away.
Have you considered that maybe you were doing something wrong? What about Eclipse-- it looks pretty much the same (and correct) to me in both GNOME and Windows.
And if a widget doesn't exist on a particular platform, you are screwed. Try printing from Eclipse on GTK/Linux:
Bug 24796 If GTK doesn't not have support for printing we are afraid that there will be no print support for SWT-GTK port. But Unix printing does not work the way it does on Windows. Dialog boxes are not required since Unix generally uses lpr with pipes to various filters. So here we have a case of the IDE developers refusing to implement a required feature in their IDE because they believe that the underlying platform (GTK) should conform to them rather than the other way around.
But then I've never understood what an IDE offers that isn't trivial to do using emacs, a shell, make, and a debugger. Maybe, an IDE with a form layout tool is useful and I haven't tried any of the Eclipse offerings in this area. I was quite disappointed with the Omando (sp?) UML tool. It crashed my Eclipse more often than not whenever I tried to use it.
Which points up another problem with Eclipse. I predict that it will descend into dll (jar) hell sometime soon. Each plugin will insist upon certain versions of jars and each tool vendor will screw up some other vendor by installing some common jar whose version is incompatible with the other tool's needs.
Talking about USPS, whatever happened to the certificate service they once started? It is no where to be found in usps.gov anymore.
Uh, you mean this?
A notary is Govt sponsored too....just so you know. Actually, it makes lots of sense to have a certified email...If it registered and verified delivery to the server then it would be just like mail..
Verifying delivery of email to a server isn't very meaningful if the server has spam filters that could potentially toss it. A real delivery verification process would require a user to digitally sign the return receipt.
remember meatspace mail is legal even if you don't take it from your mailbox...You're legally obligated to take it out and read it.
I doubt that. If this were truly the case, most of us would be in legal trouble given the amount of junk mail we toss every day.
I really don't understand the point of the BSD licence at all. Seriously, I mean it, WTF is the point? If you are going to argue for that sort of "free" then arent you really saying that people should just renounce their copyright and dump their code into the public domain?
One Word: Liability.
It is not clear that releasing code into the public domain (whatever that really means) gets you off the hook if someone incorporates it into another product and it then blows up their nuclear reactor, shoots an airliner out of the sky, or steals their wife. The BSD license is the author's way of saying "Sure, you can use it as you please, you just can't sue me if it doesn't work the way you expected."
That's why there's Duplo. My 1 year old son loves them. I build things, he chews on them. Once he gets past the put-everything-in-the-mouth stage, he'll graduate to real legos.
There is an intermediate stage: You build something, kid laughs like a fiend while he/she tears down what you just built for them.
Now that's what Lego should have done: Combine your cars with Mindstorms and run a mini-battlebots tv show. That would have been a battlebots competition that most people could actually afford to enter.
But the truth is, people don't want to choose, they want you to choose for them.
In other words, because you don't want to make choices, the rest of should be offered choices either. You speak only for yourself, please stop pretending that you know what "people" want. Many of us do want to be able to explore alternative ways of doing things and are very appreciative of those who provide the alternatives.
I seem to recall that if the platform doesn't have a widget that SWT needs, it uses its own implementation.
Or just doesn't bother implementing it at all. Try printing from eclipse on Linux.
ips are often assigned based on the network card's physical addr. Some cards have setup software that allows you to change this number. Try changing it, restart your dhcp client and see if the tcp/ip addr has changed. Set it back and see if you get your old tcp/ip addr back. RR in Columbus seems to work this way. When I have installed a new firewall, just moving the old network card to the new machine lets me keep the old tcp/ip addr.
The thing that worries me more is sexism in the Indian developer pool. I don't think I've ever seen a female indian developer, and I deal regularly with indian development teams and have noted that the male Indian developers "work to rule" with a female supervisor (catastrophic for software development, as it's the developers who spot niggling bugs), whereas they'll be helpful towards a male supervisor.
I've worked with many Indian women programmers. Even had an Indian woman boss with a PhD. I think the sex ratio between Indian men/women programmers is comparable to the US ratio.
As to the US, my dad started programming in the 1950s and noticed an influx of women into programming in the 1970s. His theory was that while most jobs have a sex asociated with them (construction workers are men, teachers and nurses are women), programming was too new to have aquired that baggage which made it easier for women to choose that profession.
But lets get a little real here about the state of the Indian university system; at best, it's grade 13.
This probably explains why so few IIT grads have been accepted into graduate school at places such as MIT, Cal Tech, or Berkeley as well as why IIT campuses rank lower in quality than nearly every other university in Asia. NOT!
Most universities have never had the ability to select the most objectively qualified candidates. Many slots at top universities are filled based on legacy. If your dad graduated from Harvard, it is much easier for you to get in than many better qualified candidates.
And we are seeing afirmative action in sports. NFL teams had better be able to explain to the NFL Commissioner why they made no effort to interview African-Americans for head coaching jobs.
Apologies for the AC post, but I've found that open discourse on such subjects tends to be shouted down as racism. Still, some things need to be said.
You are probably not racist. You are simultaneously idealistic about how things should be and naive about how things are and what it will take to get from what we have to what we all want:
India is a caste-based society. In recent times, the lower castes have been throwing their weight around in their legislature.
The caste system is breaking down fast. We adopted a little girl from India recently. Used to be that adoption was unheard of in India because you could never be sure which caste the child came from. But there has been quite an upsurge in adoptions by Indian parents in the last decade. This breakdown, though, is mostly a middle class urban phenomena. While there is a large in absolute numbers middle class in India, it is still only a moderate percentage of the entire population. Rural areas are still a bastion of the caste system, but these are not the folks doing software development.
Because of this type of (reverse) discrimination, many upper caste individuals of means leave the country to obtain education and work elsewhere. While India is a big country, the trend is concerning, and western outsourcers should be aware of it.
This isn't a trend, and I doubt it should be of real concern to western companies desiring to hire Indian programmers. India has had a discriminatory university admissions policy for at least 30 years. This issue was being fought out 20 years ago when I made my first trip to India. It is still being fought over and will continue to be fought over just as race based admissions policies are being fought over in the US. Doesn't seem to have hurt India much. Just look at the growth rates they have had since Rajiv Ghandi began to liberalise Indian economic policies in the 1980s.
I'd guess that the very best Indian students come to the US to study and work for the same reasons that many other non-USians do: the US has some of the very best universities and great job opportunities for highly skilled talented individuals. If there is a trend, it is in the opposite direction. Indians who did well here in the US are moving capital back to India, starting new companies, and donating to universities there.
It is not the cops' or the DA's job to prosecute people infringining copyright.
Then why do commercial videos/dvds start out with an FBI warning about infringement?
You people that think the cops don't have better things to do than run around chasing overwieght middle aged guys with camcorders and middle school kids with cable modems need to get your heads out of your motherfucking asses and take notice as to just how much the "law" and government have impeded where it doesn't belong over the last half century.
The cops probably won't be involved in something like this but maybe once every decade or so. As to the impedement, Gov't laws and regs come and go. Used to be all kinds of laws about what was legal to do on a Sunday. They're mostly gone now. Several industries that had been tightly regulated were dereg'd in the 1970s and 80s under Carter and then Regean. The balance will eventually tip back on these types of laws too.
BTW. I live in Ohio and don't understand why anyone would care one way or the other about this law. News for Nerds? Yawn, must be a Sunday.
detailed war plans had already been finalized...
The US maintains detailed war plans for thousands of scenarios. The length of time for preparing for war in Afghanistan vs Iraq was based on the type of and quantity of troops required. No tanks were used in Afghanistan. Moving the multi-ton M1 beheamoths used in Iraq into position takes a lot of time.
Next time find a real source who understands military logistics instead of getting your info from the Iraqi Minister of Information.
And you can thank the britshit for this. Before they lay their dirty hands on India, everyone there lived together. Now, it's three different countries who hate each other's guts.
Bullshit. Go read any basic history of the sub-continent. I'll give you a quick synopsis: From day 1, India has been composed of lots of little Hindu statelets usually ruled by petty kings who coveted each other's territory. This was followed by multiple invasions of Muslims who continued the pattern. Except that now they had Muslim petty kings fighting Hindu petty kings as well as each other. Once in a while, some petty king managed to rise to the status of a great king (e.g. Ashoka or Shah Jehan). Then the Brits came. Now you had lots of petty kings kept in check by yet another foreign power. Then the Brits left. Petty kings are out of fashion so now the sub-continent has a mixture of petty democrats and petty generals running things. And it won't do any good to shoot the current petty king. They'll just find another. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Yea, like most CIOs get their tech, political, and business news from /. You grossly overestimate /.'s influence.
Like it or not the economy is nothing more then converting natural resources into money. Natural resources are finite therefore it's a zero sum game.
Nonsense. What if we convert natural resources into capital goods that can then be substituted for the natural resources? You are making the same mistake that the classical economists made. You assume that the economy must use fixed ratios of capital, labor, and natural resources in its production function. But technology growth makes it easier and easier to produce more using higher ratios of capital to natural resources. The past 400 years of steady growth show that the economy is far from a zero sum game.
One of the fundamental tenets of contemporary capitalism is unlimited, never-ending economic growth as the keystone of prosperity. Unfortunately, no matter how little pollution you produce or how few resources you consume to fulfill the standard of living, you are eventually going to run out of SOMETHING. You can't grow forever.
And why not? Why can't productivity and technological growth guarantee ever higher standards of living? I'm an economist by training and I understand that TANSTAAFL. But that is a static concept. It says nothing about the economies long term prospects.
The founders of capitalism never took into account the impact of their theories would have on the global environment because they presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc.
Er, the founders of capitalism had no theories themselves, per se. They were just trying to get rich. But there was a theory that described what the factory owners were doing. It was first described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Karl Marx, Robert Malthus, and David Ricardo each contributed to it. That theory, known as classical economics today, does, in fact, take account of the effects of humans on the environment. Malthus famously worried so much about this that even today we talk about Malthusian catastrophies where human population growth outstrips resource limits.
Problem was, they were mostly all wrong. Smith based his theories on the notion that economic value was based on the amount of labor that went into the production of a good. His production function (the amount of output as a function of the quantity of inputs) was based on the idea that labor and capital had to be used in a fixed ratio to produce larger amounts of output. But it is obvious to us today that it is usually possible to substitute between labor and capital. Smith also missed out on the notion of productivity gains where the same quantities of inputs could produce larger amounts of output through time.
It is this last one that is where hope lies. For the last 400 years, we have steadily increased the productivity and standard of living of, at least, those people living in the developed nations. No reason I can think of to assume technology advances won't continue. And if they do, they may well render the whole problem of global warming irrelevent. Either new tech is found that scrubs CO2 from the air at a reasonable cost (maybe some kind of super tree) or new tech is found that provides cheap energy without releasing CO2 (fusion?).
I've never understood either the greens or the far right. Why can't I have cheap energy, a high standard of living, and a clean environment?
Wasn't just the old map makers. Printers who calculated and printed tables of logarithms, trig functions, and other assorted ilk would do the same thing in order to be able to sue competitors who copied their books.
I'm gonna start my own government where everyone has to pass a test on LotR to become a citizen. Science and engineering all the time? Too boring.
... 2) the trend of reducing unemployment reversed towards higher unemployment in the time around the 2000 election, where Bush Jr. policies were not yet in place.
Bush policies began to be put into place during the last 2 years of Clinton's final term. We had a Republican Congress and a lame duck President. IIRC, the first of Bush's massive tax cuts was passed before Clinton left office.
Software development is a hard and tedious job. If you're not prepared to stick to the tedious process, then there are much fewer jobs available to you.
Disagree. Those parts of any job that are tedious are ripe for automation. Javadoc and doxygen are classic examples where much of the tedium of producing documentation has been automated leaving the creative part (the wordsmithing) alone.
There are unions for skilled workers...
Yes, lots of them. Airline mechanics and pilots are a good example.
Government employees are usually members. (Don't laugh. Government employees include NASA and Ames and Los Alamos and the like, most of whose researchers are Union.)
Bzzzt. The researchers at places like Los Alamos and ORNL are not unionized. They are treated more like university professors with the exception that there is no tenure available. The tradesmen who build the bomb parts at Y-12 along with the cafeteria workers, on the other hand, are unionized. Generally, those with university degrees who work for the contractor (Univ of Tenn, Univ of CA, Batelle, etc.) are not unionized at DOE facilities.