Don't be a Robot!

I am sick of American politics. Watching the past few debates has reminded me more of two preprogrammed robots than anything. Rather than seeing how their ideas bounce off of each other, they just keep saying the same things over and over again.

We already know how you stand on economic policies! We know what you think about foreign policy! What we want to know is why you think that way. We want to see that you've thought out your stance, not just that you have one! We already know that!

Conversely, here's what my ideal candidate would say:
I acknowledge both that there are benefits to both raising taxes on the upper class, and lowering taxes for everyone. There needs to be a balance between helping the poor and helping the economy. That balance is (insert a thought-out economic policy here). The balance lies there because (insert reasoning why the line is there)

The point here is that Democrats and Republicans both have good ideas, and I have never heard a candidate attempt to take the best of both! (And of course, those two parties don't have a monopoly on good ideas) Robots can be programmed to defend any policy. A human will think about those policies, apply reason, and come up with something better!

Flex Builder in Linux!

I was excited to learn today that Adobe is working on a version of the Flex Builder Eclipse plugin for Linux. It's available now in alpha. It doesn't do some of the design layout stuff yet, but it does do code completion and syntax highlighting. (Besides, only people who hate source code use the design layout tool!)

One word of caution: the plugin currently only works with Eclipse 3.3.x! Ubuntu gave me Eclipse 3.2.2, which didn't work with it, so I tried the latest release, 3.4.1. That one doesn't work either! You need 3.3.x.

Anyway, here's the download page. You get much longer than the standard 60-day evaluation period. Enjoy!