I feel like the la times (http://www.latimes.com/) has become more conservative since the gray davis recall movement began. Is a country with two right coasts like a dancer with two right feet?

This whole deal with the shooting in the New York city hall is very strange. Everything just feels much more violent than it used to...every day in the news someone's been shot. Soldiers in Iraq, factory workers in missisippi, families in california...maybe this is the way that it's always been and I just notice more because we're at war and the economy's gone to crap.

I've been working on my java reversi game. It works, sort of, but it's very, very easy to beat. I think I need to revisit my strategy logic. I'm trying to implement alpha/beta min/max and I think I screwed it up.

I'm wondering what's going to happen with Java. I'm betting that Linux/Perl/Java, etc. will beat out Microsoft in the long run because the open source software doesn't have to make a profit and there are a lot of very poor, very smart people in India and Russia (and, and...) that can't afford legal copies of the Microsoft O/S and development tools. Microsoft, due to the faltering economy will have to clamp down on their licensing (they're already doing this with mixed success) and this will make it harder for non-US/Europe folks to obtain the pirated copies that many of them use. They'll turn to open source.

On the flip side, I can't see a profit motive for improving open source software. I think currently a lot of US and European companies pay their developers to work on open source projects. As the economy continues to sink, there will probably be less of this going on.

I like Java, though. Dot Net strikes me as a bit of a kludge in some ways.