Bush's deficit was a result of unnecessary spending designed to keep him in office. His re-election prospects were vastly smaller without an on-going war. I can't count the number of moderates who were considering voting for him only because they thought that it was dangerous to change commander in chiefs in the middle of a war. It's clear that there was no justifiable reason to invade Iraq; therefore, the Iraq war was unnecessary, and therefore the billions of dollars spent on that war were needless waste.

Furthermore, we weren't in an economic crisis for most of the wild spending that the Bush administration was involved in. It was only in the last 8th of his presidency that he can claim that the spending bills were related to the financial crisis.

Don't try to blame the other 7 years of fiscal irresponsibility on the last year of crisis.

Nobody's blaming the current financial crisis on Bush. I'll happily blame it on conservatives, and excessive laisse-faire economics and deregulation, but Clinton was just as guilty there. However, Bush's borrow-and-spend economics put the country in a really bad position to deal with this crisis. The car's tires blowing out isn't his fault, but the crazy driving at high speeds near the edge of the cliff is.

--- SER

He didn't care enough to not get them needlessly killed in the first place.

--- SER

Hm. According to the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, Ruby is 140 times slower than C (the median, across all tests). Ruby 1.9 is "only" 52 times slower than C. Three times faster than that means that MacRuby is only 17 times slower than C. Which makes it only twice as slow as Lua and only three times as slow as Lisp. I wouldn't classify that as "quite fast", although that's a bit more than twice as fast than Python, which is pretty good.

God, I love the CLBG (which used to be the GCPLS).

In any case, I love Ruby for what it is good at -- one-off scripts that grow gracefully. I've grown distrustful of languages that don't support any form of pre-runtime type checking for non-trivial application development. That's not a failing that is particular to Ruby, though.

My response was that it doesn't matter, if you want to run on oddball hardware, you could run pretty much the same OS on all the same oddball hardware.

I'm taking you out of context, but I want what you say to be true so badly that I need to respond.

Sadly, not all OSes are fungible. In fact, that's the exception rather than the rule. BSD, Windows, and Linux might be fungible, but Minix, Mac OSX, and OpenSolaris aren't. I don't run Minix on my laptop only because it would render half of the hardware features unusable (sleep mode, touch screen, etc.); this is the same situation with most of the other non-mainstream OSes out there. I can't run OSX mostly because of the Apple hardware department's death-grip on Apple's (the company) testicles. In fact, even within Linux, I've had varying degrees of success with hardware support with different distributions.

In my experience, the fungability of which you speak is a myth.

--- SER