My intention wasn't to be partisan at all, actually. I just noticed how goofy political "philosophies" seem when we set them aside for a minute. It didn't come across in my post, for sure. I should really edit before I submit next time.

As someone who also happens to be a liberal, I applaud the amount of critical thinking and self examination in your post. In fact, if such wisdom were inherent in all humans, perhaps anarchist philosophies inherent in conservatism would actually work. Now there's a funny thought.

But you're supposing that you're paying for consumption. That's a very reasonable ideal.

Netflix is paying for content, which is one step towards turning them into any other "content provider," which is exactly where telcos want them to be. They want to be in between us and Netflix so that Netflix will scratch their beak.

The end game is not you or I paying for tiers of "bandwidth," it's getting us to pay for tiers of "content" -- we should resist this rather forcefully.

Ruby is alive as long as people are willing to program in it. Also, it's very easy to find employment as a ruby programmer. I don't know what you're definition of "dead" is, but ruby certainly fails to meet mine.

Now, if the popularity were to decline to the point where no one was hiring ruby programmers anymore, then I'd obviously have to learn whatever displaced ruby. I'm going to assume that whatever displaces ruby will be an improvement. So I win either way.

You're sounding positively curmudgeonly... or maybe I'm not reading you right.

I started ruby (and rails) in 2008. I really, really loved the community around it. Back then, very, very few programmers were into ruby, since there really weren't any jobs out there. Of course, there were a lot of php programmers who adopted rails because it was so much better than php, and they often wrote awful code. But by and large most rubyists were the kind of people you wanted to work with because they made you a better programmer.

To me, the big shift that turned the community into a giant wasteland was things like CodeAcademy -- the idea that rails (and therefore ruby) would be a great platform for people who want to learn to program for the first time. Then you suddenly just started seeing codebases pop up all over the place written by very inexperienced programmers with no clue what they were doing, or any experience with software design in general.

I really, really love ruby, but I often grow tired of the community around it. I take issue with your final paragraph -- there are a ton of great ruby (and even rails) codebases out there. Your personal experiences may be artificially depressing your opinion.

I started with C, and I absolutely loved it (and still do). I also grew to love ruby's mix of OO and functional programming -- C features neither of these. Go figure.

I'd say becoming a good C coder flexes certain muscles that are essential to being a great software designer/programmer in general, but it doesn't flex all of them.

If you, falling into the "actually need it category," are the exception to the rule, then I don't see how your personal story fits in with the larger discussion about the value of electric vehicles.

Sadly, my impression in the average slashdotter has degenerated so much over the last decade that it didn't even occur to me that the OP wasn't being sarcastic.

Actually, emacs and gcc are pretty triumphant pieces of computer programming.

Sounds like D2. I played for hundreds of hours, farming the high end caves, and managed to build enough wealth on battle.net to trade for pretty awesome gear. But it was a long haul. Very fun, though.

Actually, unless I'm misunderstanding you, that's a key feature of D2 that D3 was missing. I remember collecting runes to build weapons that gave me all sorts of cool abilities from other classes.

Coffee. Splat. Monitor.

It's not that he doesn't know what the term "accident" means, it was more an incorrect understanding of its' meaning.

Wow, I'm dyslexic today. I read "how the economy fares AFTER their 4 or 8 years in office" as "how the economy fares AFTER 4 or 8 years from their office." My bad! I'll try to read more clearly next time. I really have heard quite a few people espouse the belief that I had incorrectly mistaken for your actual point.

Claiming that 4 or 8 years is the magic amount of time that all economic policy effects lag behind their enactments is every bit is flawed as direct correlation.

In truth, the economy *can* fluctuate wildly based on day to day activity. If Wall Street doesn't like who is in power, Wall Street will often respond immediately.

But I agree with your larger point; evaluating economic policy needs to be based upon sound economic analysis. Good luck getting that from our childish politicians and kneejerk media outlets :(