*sigh* my kingdom for an EDIT button on slashdot. How many typos and errors can a person make in a single post? Sorry.

As with most things, the correct approach is a balanced one. Going to extremes on either side of the issue with invariably result in negative consequences.

Having an in-depth knowledge of html, css and javascript is crucial to effective web development and design. Having design/graphical tools let's you step back from the code and see things in a "big-picture" light, allowing you to create innovative designs that you probably wouldn't have considered otherwise.

I generally use both approaches. I like to use Artisteer to generate random designs to get concept ideas (I'm not a graphic designer). When I find a concept I like, I take the generated results and convert them into the final code I want. Here's an example of that approach: Master Iron Company

Sometime I take the hand-coded approach if I'm just playing around and experimenting. Here's an example of that: MotorTap (a product I developed, and make the web site for).

Great post, though I'm not sure I agree with your point about 3D printers. I foresee local community and neighborhood 3D printers installed and serviced by that you can just send your 3D model to, and walk over to pick it up in a couple hours. Costs will be automatically charged to your CC. A large part of retail cost is in shipping/fuel costs. Consider the enormous amount of fuel/labor required to get a $.50 plastic widget transported across the world to your local Walmart, plus the fuel cost of you driving to the local store to buy it.

Next time I need a couple wall hangers, instead of getting in my V8 Chevy, spending $5 on gas to drive to walmart, I could just pick from "top reviewed" models on the internet, select one, send it to my local printer, and walk/ride by bike over to pick it up, saying hi to my neighbors on the way, and my total cost isn't much higher than the raw cost of plastic feed. This seem pretty Utopian to me, and I don't think we're too far away from it, honestly.

This will cause a massive reduction in the low-price widget sales of the big box stores, which will then need to focus on larger more complex items that can't be easily fabricated, which is a good thing.

As to all the folks on here who are screaming that the sky is falling and the middle class will be destroyed along with all those precious manufacturing jobs - pfft. Nonsense. People cry tearfully and dramatically about this same old thing every time a disruptive technology emerges. Strangely, it never happens, and the end result is a dramatically increased standard of living.

Just as the guys who worked on the assembly line of the buggy-whip manufacturers could have never conceived of the current job pool (Imagine trying to explain job reqs for a social media analyst to this person) we're equally limited in our ability to conceive of what the future will look like.

This, I think, it my primary problem with (for lack of a better term) "liberal" thought. I don't fault the motivation, I think that these sorts of ideas come from people who have a strong sense of justice and compassion. My problem is that it seems like "liberals" tend to take an extremely simplistic view of possible solutions, and have little comprehension for the unintended consequences of their proposals.

For example, we have rich people, and we have poor people. The "liberal" sense of justice is very simple: let's take stuff from the rich folks and give it to the poor folks. That solves the problem, right? What could possibly go wrong?

I'll take a rough stab at answering this.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand took the (for lack of better terms) "collectivist" (liberal, etc...) and "individualist" (libertarian, fiscal conservative, Austrian school, etc...) schools of thought to their logical extremes. Liberalism, of course failed miserably in her example, but it is also quite telling that in order for her fictitious libertarian paradise to succeed it required technological/science fiction props (free energy, projected holograms, infinite broadcast power, etc...).

Ayn Rand demonstrated a clear assumption that intellectual property rights would be respected by both "sides" of the conflict. This is demonstrated with the subplot of the government using dirty tricks and manipulation to force Hank Reardon to sign over rights to Reardon Metal to the government. This was considered a fundamental attribute of the United States, as compared with other countries (note the nationalization of Francisco D'Antonio's assets). So, she clearly demonstrates that she believes in IP protections. John Galt, the character, would also share in these beliefs, since he's represented as the embodiment of her highest ideals.

As to the internal consistency of this, I agree that on the surface there is some conflict. Especially given Rand's discussion of force as being the antithesis of reason, but to rely on force to protect that which reason creates could be considered inconsistent. There is an exception to Rand's disavowal of force, however. She absolutely recognizes force as necessary to protect one's self and property. She also recognizes the military as one of the few legitimate functions of the government. This is made clear by the following excerpt from The Virtue of Selfishness:

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality"

Ayn Rand makes it clear that she supports the court systems and police force as a legitimate function of government to protect property and, by extension, ideas (patents/copyright).

I'm frequently surprised at comments I see that conflate Ayn Rand/objectivism/libertarianism with anarchy. It is simply not true, and is mostly only done by those who have little education or understanding of those philosophies.

There's no evidence, that I'm aware of, that Ayn Rand ever considered government to be "evil". What she considered "evil" or immoral, was a government that exceeded it's bounds and participated in activities outside of which those that she considered to be legitimate functions.

Which is quite logical and consistent. There may be parts of the legislation that are worthy and legitimate, and if you poll people on those parts, they will respond positively. But will that same person support a law that's over two thousand pages long, that no one in congress has actually read, that no one is quite certain what it will do? Well, it's pretty reasonable to say "Umm, no - I don't think I can get behind that."

But please, don't let a little rational, critical thinking stop your party bashing. It's great for mod points, after all.

Agreed.

Way to avoid the actual subject, evidence, math and science and just reply with sarcasm with a sprinkle of xenophobia mixed in.

You sir, win the most worthless post of the day award.

Wrong. over population is a myth.

This seems more reasonable to me than all the hysteria: Over Population is a Myth

I was planning to book a skiing vacation in Colorado, but it looks at if all the sweet powder will be on the mountains in hell.

I'm not sure what the point of this "article" is. It is light on actual information or anything useful, it's basically just a few paragraphs that say "a NoSQL database called Mongo stored data in JSON format. This may or may not work for you".

If we're going to have "BI" articles, they should be informative, containing useful information that we couldn't have gathered ourselves in 10 secs of googling.

How about some comparisons between various NoSQL solutions? How about binary access API v/s RESTful approach ala Couch? How about clustering, replication and scalability? How about stability concerns (with Couch, for example). Real world use cases? Examples of companies using them for specific solutions? Performance comparisons with RDBMS's? Problem domains that NoSQL/schema less DB is more suited to than a RDMBS?

I'm not trying to be pointlessly critical here, I'm trying to provide some constructive feedback on the new slashdot BI format. This article wasn't useful to me at all. I'll probably not spend time reading these articles in the future if the content is as light as this article.

It's not that we're missing out. It's that some of us have put up with statically typed languages for 15 years, and have had enough of that crap.

If you don't like dynamic languages, fine, but implying that folks who choose to embrace FP and dynamic languages are "hobbyists" serves no purpose other than to expose your lack of depth as a developer.

Read this and take a long hard look at yourself.

My understanding (extremely rudimentary) was that Tesla's idea for wireless transmission of power was based on the notion that he could use the entire planet as a giant capacitor, with the earth and ionosphere acting as conducting plates and the air as the insulator.

His notion was that you could pump a bunch of energy into this giant capacitor, and then tap it anywhere else on the planet.

Whether this is crackpot or not, I can't say - I'm no EE. But FWIW - Tesla wasn't just trying to beam power with radio waves.

I agree with this completely, I just implemented a project that uses an XML data store.

It's an interesting architecture, each instance gets a 20ish meg XML file, loaded into memory. This is then queried with e4x for the UI. It's blazing fast, and doesn't need any round trips to a database server, and it's quick to develop.

Of course, the only reason I can get away with this is because it's read-only, so technically it isn't a data store, but a data transmission methodology. Still, in most traditional apps I've seen, this would have had an n-tier kind of thing, where the UI queries middleware, which talks to a DB. Using a big ole XML doc as a read-only data source has been pretty cool, and worked great. It's also massively decreased points of failure and opportunities for bugs.

I went back and forth quite a bit on XML v/s JSON for this, but I ended up going with XML because e4x is pretty nice for querying data. I fully expect to redo all this in a few years if/when I migrate to HTML5 for the UI, because other than Mozilla no browser vendor will support e4x.

Sigh, 'your', not 'you're'. *facepalm*

I'm off to self-flagellate .