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Jim Gray Is Missing
K-Man writes "Jim Gray, Turing Award winner and developer of many fundamental database technologies, was reported missing at sea after a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands off San Francisco. Gray is manager of Microsoft's eScience group. The Coast Guard is searching for his vessel over 4,000 square miles of ocean, and there have been no distress calls or signals of any kind. Gray is 63 and a sailor with 10 years' experience."
8 of the first 10 comments made by complete wankers
No. Apparently this sort of device hasn't been invented yet, or surely they would have saved James Kim. Now why the rescue workers don't have this kind of thing is a good question. Even if it can't handle calls but can just give a direction to the phone's 'ping' it would be good enough to find people with.
Seriously though, there's a good chance he's OK. The weather out here has been great today, and he hasn't been gone that long. One of the following probably happened:
For a second there, I thought Slashdot would drop this stupid anti-Microsoft bullshit and at least show some compassion.
Nothing said he didn't have one - they're for life-threatening emergency only. If he is safe but just off-course, he may not have activated it.
Seeing all these Slashdot posts joking about a man who may very well be dead makes me sick.
Please have some respect for the man. I can understand joking about Hans Reiser because there is a motive behind what he did.
But this man hasn't done anything (at least to the best of my knowledge) to warrant any sort of morbid humor.
The man has 10 years of sailing experience apparently, so I can only hope for the best for him.
He's working for MS. This by itself does not really endear him to a sizeable portion of the people here. Besides, few people know him, and those who do (read the comments, a few people here actually met him) do show compassion.
Do you show compassion for people you don't know? Or at least heard about? I have a hunch the reaction would be slightly different if, say, Hawking was gone missing or even dead.
People dying is no longer something that bothers us. That's not even a Slashdot phenomenon. We see and hear it all the times, in the news. People die. Deal. That's what we get told, and thus death (as long as it's not someone we care about) has become something to shrug off. When you get told that people dying in a war as innocent bystanders are brushed aside as collateral damage, you tend to get quite cold inside.
So I wouldn't really wonder how that comments come into existance. It's simply the normal flow of operation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
cost benefit analysis probably showed that a human life isn't worth the cost of such a device.
a solo sailor with 10 years of experience should probably have known to bring an EPIRB that is either activated manually or when getting in contact with water, even though they're still quite expensive, there's no faster way of getting help out there.
- It's the standard, vendor extensions for outer joins (+) are non-standard. Hence helps with code portablity.
- It's a lot easier to read.
- It keeps operations that are conceptually seperate (joins and filtering the data set) syntactically seperate.
- A few other advantages, including: full outer joins are possible which had to be fudged with UNIONs before, and cartesian products cannot be created accidentally but have to be explicitly specified.
Making jokes about a situation such as this might not be considered acceptable by everyone, but let's look at the facts here. A small percentage of Slashdotters know this guy. A small percentage of people react with shock/grief upon hearing of the possible death of someone they do not know, and possibly have never heard of. It is scarcely reasonable to expect everyone to treat the situation with as much gravity as you guys are doing. If any of us here had the opportunity to actually rescue this man, I'm sure none of us would hesitate. However, on a computer many miles away from the problem, do you really expect us to light a candle and pray? Also, some of the jokes were fucking hilarious.
Reiser only kills women.
--
ReiserFS: It puts the "stab" in fstab
ReiserFS: The Killer Filesystem
ReiserFS: It's to die for
ReiserFS: How do you want to die today?
"Jim Gray, Turing Award winner and developer of many fundamental database technologies, was reported missing at sea after a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands off San Francisco."
So it's probably calloused to be talking about the Darwin award, but this is something you simply have to expect when you go on these solo sailing expeditions. Sure, there's the allure of "one man against the sea," but the sea often wins (has a very long history of wins, in fact), and if you don't take the necessary precautions, well... when you want to take your life into your own hands like that, by definition everything that happens to you is your own fault.
What's to accept? These days '60-ish' isn't exactly old, never mind 'very old'. My parents are far healthier at this age (mid-60s) than their parents ever were. Also, sailing isn't an 'extreme sport'. Sailing solo is inherently risky, regardless of age, and regardless of the size of the boat.
Listen up, not-old-people! It's not up to you what risks other people wish to undertake! If it doesn't pose an immediate danger to you, mind your own business!
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
1) He fell overboard. With or without a PDF (life jacket) he'd be dead. Th water is cold up there, low 50's I think so hypothermia will get him even if he does not drown.
2) A common danger is the boom. If the boat does an unplanned jibe and the sailor forgets to duck he can get hit hard on the head with a fairly massive chunk of aluminum boom. This could knock him out, kill him outright (not likely) or (more likely) knock him overboard. (see #1 above)
3) His boat could have hit something and sunk. Then we are back to #1 above. If he was very lcky he could have goten a life raft out. But them most rafts are equipted with a GPS and a radio.
4) some kind of a medical problem. Then it's not really a boating accident but just not a good place to have such a problem
It's hard to understand how any of this could happen. An experienced sailor would have himself tethered to the boat at all times with a tether short enough that he could not fall into the water. He would know not to let a boom hit him and would maintain a watch for ship traffic.
All you guys posting jokes, do me a favor. Bookmark this page, then when you grow up - say in 5 or 10 years, however long it takes you, come back to this thread and read what you wrote. You will then notice, like the rest of us reading this now, that you are all completely insensitive dicks..
You think drowning on a canoe trip at age 60+ is a bad way to die? I think it was a pretty good one considering some of the alternatives I've seen. Perhaps you'd prefer spending your last decade from age 85 to 95, bed-ridden, incoherent and pissing yourself in a nursing home with one visitor a week (or month or year for that matter)?