More like that it was a real grey area and no-one knew what the rules were, or if the American bill of rights extended to foreigners (or even citizens) in the customs area.
Not for encryption keys, but there are *plenty* of stories of detentions and, more often, send-backs and equipment seizures of/from foreigners from US shores for very flimsy reasons. I've seen several on slashdot, look around a bit.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say "thank god! an end to the encryption related detentions!", I was trying to say "it's good to know what the actual law is and that it's not just going to be up to some overzealous customs guy".
I think this kind of thing will do a lot to restore people's peace of mind. That's all I meant.
I know a lot of people who were getting very nervous about even *visiting* the USA. Think they're overreacting and melodramatic? Think again - all we hear are stories of how foreigners, with no rights, detained by customs, forced to incriminate themselves, forced to give up encryption keys on threat of indefinite detention in stateless legal no-mans-land.. how reasonable it is to worry about it all *that* much is questionable but it's undeniably been a bad trend for a long time.
This, though - an unequivocal restoration of the right to silence, at a border no less - is a *very* welcome development. Let's hope it's the first in a long run of "restoration" decisions as the pendulum swings back from the terrorism bubble.
Really happy to see this. I'm not American, but I was taking no joy whatsoever in watching the previous slide. I'm feeling pretty joyful to see this kind of thing, though - separation of powers worked in the end!
Here's to a few more key decisions like this. Go USA.
Wow, rich white guys who own yachts have a positive experience with the police? Who woulda thunk it.
But notice how quickly their behaviour changed when conspicuous proof of your elevated status was not at hand. That's right, sitting in an interview room for hours while your kids asked their grandparents where you were.
I'm a rich white guy myself, and funnily enough I've never been pulled over in my BMW. But dress down a bit and you'll notice their attitude do a 180 degrees turn. Look a little bit down on your luck and they treat you like utter scum. Maybe try it sometime.
9/11 came a lot closer than a lot of people want to admit to achieving that second goal. The world economy tettered on the brink of a total collapse for several weeks.
Jesus Christ, over-dramatic much? *Total collapse*?! Even if the entire city of New York had been nuked into radioactive glass the world economy wouldn't have come close to total collapse. You think the farmer milking his cows for my breakfast tomorrow is going to just give up and shoot himself because some financial market in the USA is no more? Give me a break.
The whole continent of North America could disappear into a black hole tomorrow and the world would go on. Sure, there would be massive disruption, stockmarket crashes, years of setback, corporate bankruptcies, bank runs, etc. But the world would go on and after 10 years you wouldn't even be able to tell.
And the most important financial city in the world, for your information, isn't even NYC - it's London.
America has less than 5% of the world's population. Sure, it has the largest concentration of wealth in a single country - for now. It's still the single most important country financially, but nothing like the titan it was even 10 years ago. Geeze, look outside the window once in a while, why don't you.
Microsoft's chronic insecuity could very well end up destroying our very Civilization.
I don't know exactly what type of drugs you're on, but here's a bit of advice anyway: take less of them.
There have already been about a million comments about aerobic vs. weight training exercise, so I won't repeat that too much, but one thing I "discovered" which really helped is the Les Mills group exercise programs, especially my favourite, Body Combat.
It's basically doing martial arts moves to dance music. I'm a highly self-conscious introvert as well, so I could never get into any group exercise in the past, but BC is kind of "cool enough" that I feel less like some dick doing aerobics and more like a Shaolin monk doing a monastery training routine.
You might find it a little intimidating at first, so I would recommend, uh, grabbing some of the recent videos via bittorrent *cough* so you can check it out and get up to speed on the kind of moves you'll be seeing. I recommend grabbing the latest (36) off mininova or something. Watch it, go along with the moves until you're comfortable, and then find a gym nearby that supports it.
You might be surprised by how fun it is - and you can't beat doing it at a gym, with the super loud music and peer pressure to put in the effort. You will feel a lot less gay doing martial arts moves to music than the usual aerobics fare. Plus the people you'll find there are also usually pretty cool.
Plus, as everyone said already, ride everywhere you possibly can. If you can't ride in your area, vote with your feet (wheels?) and *move*. When I used to live in Japan I was about 5kg less than my current (western) location simply because riding everywhere was actually more convenient than any other method. That is the way it should be and now I try to match my lifestyle to the Japanese "experience" as much as possible. There's a reason fat Japanese are rare; less cars, basically.
Don't eat food which is ridiculously laden with fat - especially savoury fatty foods which are deceptive because you don't think of them as sweets. Chief offenders are things like pizza and crisps. Any food which is actually physically heavy is suspect and should probably be limited. Turn down all of that, and turn up the salads, and you might be surprised just how easy it is to keep the weight off and stay decently trim.
Eat reasonable food, ride or walk around as much as possible, and go to the gym a couple of times a week - chances are you'll have lost the weight and keep it off pretty quickly.
Seriously? Mine does (Willoughby LGA, Sydney NSW Australia). Hell, you can make requests for them to buy things and if they think it's any good they usually do. The nuts thing is they then ring you and tell you it's in and reserved for you, you just go pick it up!
The problem is if you're looking for something specific - if you didn't suggest it and it's popular it's probably out, and then they charge a "booking fee" of $2 so you may as well just rent it. But since they generally choose reasonably meritorious movies anyway, there's usually something decent there - I often go and look at what they've got if I want to watch something but don't have anything particular in mind. Pretty happy with it so far.
Anyway if anyone was looking for someone to thank for the fact that Chatswood library now has the complete Ghost in the Shell SAC series on DVD, I await your effusive praise ; )
You talk like we've discovered everything there is to know. I like how you used the word "feasible", though, it's very telling. Superluminal travel is indeed unfeasible, for us, right now.
But just think about what we don't know. We have no unified theory of the universe or even fricking gravity. We can predict it but we can't explain it. We don't know why qusntum entanglement works. We don't even know what comprises something like 90% of the estimated mass of the universe. To summarise, we don't know jack shit.
Quantum state is superluminal. That's a chink in your Relativity armour wide enough to drive a bus through. If quantum state can do it, rest assured, something else can too.
I pride myself on being a fairly rational person, and I am hardly an expert on quantum mechanics or indeed spacetime theory. But I do know enough to know that we just don't know anything. I am not trying to convince you that superluminal travel *is* possible. I am trying to convince you that our current knowledge is not even close to being able to rule it out, or make any comment really, one way or the other.
You should read a bit before you act so dismissively. Some of this shit will blow your mind. You do know that mass curves spacetime, right? In other words, it is *possible* to curve spacetime? In other words you can probably do it deliberately, given enough energy?
Our understanding of all this is at about the same level as a 17th century alchemists' understanding of the nature of matter. They were beginning to suspect that, given a ridiculous amount of energy and the right conditions, you might, just might, say, refine aluminium into a pure form. Well whaddya know, here we are, 300 years later, typing on our computers made of refined aluminium, and thinking that given a ludicrous amount of energy and the right conditions you might, just might, be able to curve spacetime enough to enable a specified object to make a superluminal jump.
Give us 500 years.
But I do agree that UFO theories are in all likelihood BS. Wishful thinking, like I said, from people with the need to believe humans are important in the universe.
Yeah, fair enough. I think I came off a little strong, sorry if I sounded arrogant/unrealistic.
I just wish we could fix these fucking conditions. I feel guilty when I walk past someone in a wheelchair. I feel guilty when I see some poor sap with a blind stick tapping his way down the street. I wish we could just fix them.
Wheelchair ramps and braille elevator buttons are pretty weak fucking sauce. I just want to fix these horrible problems and get people on their feet and living normal lives again. And it really just pisses me off when we just accept these kinds of ruinous injuries. And, worse, the PC industry seems to have gotten it into its head that such debilitating conditions are normal! Have you seen the ads? "Don't dis my ability"! Fucking hell man we should be *fixing* this shit, not just trying to brainwash the afflicted that somehow not being able to walk kicks ass.
Sure we can't give up on the wheelchair ramps (as a temporary measure) but how about equal expenditure on the basic research? Pretty please?
I have some doctor friends, so I'm well aware of how hard the problems are. But that also gave me an all-too-good understanding of how scattered, disorganised, ad hoc and directionless the research is.
I don't give a shit how many ramps they have to roll up and down. Every single person in a wheelchair is a person we have failed. Society, and medical science, has failed and now they're trapped in a fucking rolling chair for the rest of their lives.
That REALLY sucks and I just wish we could do more about it.
Oh come on. Do you really believe humanity, as of 2008, has discovered every secret of science there is? We have reached the universal pinnacle of transportation technology? Nothing we can't do right now, today, is possible, full stop end of story?
Give me a break. Our current technology does not even scratch the surface. 99% of our transportation is still powered by burning oil, for christ's sake!
Think how far humankind has come in the last 1000 years. Now imagine where we might be in another 1000. And another. And another. And another few million.
Do you really think that 1 million AD humans don't know a thing or two about the structure of spacetime that we don't? You sound like a medieval knight telling me, with absolute certainty, that humans will never fly because we are heavier than air.
I couldn't agree more. These people stating with such certainty that there is no such thing as extraterrestrial life are nuts. My view is that people who seriously believe we are alone in the universe just don't understand the numbers.
You "unbelievers" do know how many stars there are in the universe, don't you? It's around 10^21. Do you have any comprehension at all of what kind of a number that is?
The chance of us, out of the countless trillions of star systems in the universe and over billions of years, somehow being the only place to develop any form of intelligent life is so remote I can't take it seriously. Of course other systems have intelligent life. It's as statistically certain as the sun coming up tomorrow. Probably a few orders of magnitude more so.
People talk about fools who "believe" in aliens but they're believers in a much more unlikely scenario, IMO. I don't know why this insistence that we're "alone" is so common - some relic of Christian "we are god's favourites" or something, maybe.
We haven't even made it to the nearest star, FFS. Who knows what is out there. We certainly don't and anyone who claims to - or claims to know what is NOT out there - is talking out their ass.
Not that I give this astronaut much credence, of course. Why would an advanced alien species bother with earth? Believing that they do without any solid evidence to back it up is just another kind of "humans are important" wishful thinking, IMO.
No, but we could at least throw SOME money at it. How much is being spent doing serious federally-funded medical research to cure, say, paraplegia/quadroplegia? Well, I don't know if there's even a program. There is natural progress in surgery but hardly a concerted effort. And no private companies are willing to spend money on medical cures for people who could never afford to pay a proportionate cost for the treatment.
The ADA, on the other hand, is estimated to cost $10-20 billionn for retrofitting public buildings and infrastructure alone.
(mind you I do not agree with CATO. They simply have the numbers on their site)
Imagine what we could achieve with a tenth of that money "thrown" at a concerted effort to develop techniques and technology to heal spinal damage.
We can't solve everything overnight, sure, and money isn't pixie dust that just magics these probelms away - but we could at least make some organised effort.
I am not suggesting we make the disabled sit around not being able to get into buildings, of course. We should find a balance, though, between trying to work around their disabilities while accepting they are disabled as some kind of "act of god", and putting some serious effort into trying to fix the problem at its root.
You say we can't leave the disabled waiting outside buildings they're unable to roll into. But how many would rather just get up and walk up the stairs?
You know what? I hate concessions to "disabled" people. To me they seem to telegraph this notion that it's OK people are disabled, and we all just have to work around their disabilities.
That is bullshit. The problem is not the access, it's the disabilities in the first place. I often wonder that if half the money that's poured into making buildings (and web-sites) "disability friendly" was instead directed into fast-track R&D for actually *curing* the disabilities, whether we'd be able to solve the real problem in a much, MUCH better way.
I hate disabilities. I hate the whole idea that someone bangs their spine in the wrong place and suddenly they can never walk again. The solution to their problem isn't installing wheelchair ramps all over the place, it's getting the disabled walking again.
And yet we must spend 100x the amount on making everything "disability friendly" compared to research on actually fixing the problems. It's the wrong way round, it's the coward's way, and that really pisses me off.
Yeah, I've considered that and even played around with it a bit. But my goal here is to reduce complexity, and implementing that kind of solution (for multiple apps in multiple languages) would have the exact opposite effect. It's far easier to simply stick with PGSQL.
My enemy is complexity and vendor lock-in, in any form. Implementing the custom MySQL view would be 1 step forward (ease of administration) and two steps back (custom config). Doing what you suggest would be one step forward, 10 steps back and would require pervasive code and library changes!
I'm all for hacking around problems I find and then sharing them for others to use - I've released many patches and how-tos to allow Ruby on Rails to use UUIDs as its primary keys, for example. But there's also the consideration of whether something *should* be hacked around and papered over. I am personally of the opinion that nobody, including me, should be forced to come up with low-level workarounds to what I consider to be basic functionality holes in MySQL. The work of supporting sub-second timestamps is by all rights MySQL's job. Everyone else does it and I can't for the life of me understand why they haven't.
So that's my reasoning - I am sure some will disagree, but I hope I've made a fairly rational argument.
I have checked out Firebird in the past and it looks great - but there's a huge chicken and egg problem. Basically, to adopt a DB requires that it be supported in the languages I use - and for scripting this kind of thing I use Ruby. I can't find any firebird support, native or otherwise, for Ruby, let alone support in the more high-level libraries like ActiveRecord or DataMapper.
I'm not trying to put down the project - it looks great. But I can't possibly afford the time or resources to develop all my own libraries from scratch. That might sound selfish, like I'm all take and no give, and expect everything to be packaged nicely just for me - but I don't think so, I contribute where I can. I just can't do that kind of thing alone. I have deadlines and a budget, and to try to trailblaze a new path supporting a newish, as-yet pretty obscure DB would be suicidal.
If firebird really pans out and becomes a (widely accepted) viable alternative to the "majors" I will be there contributing patches and doing what I can. But I can't be the lone crusader who starts down that path. To be brutally honest, judging from past experience, it will probably have to be the developers themselves who start that ball rolling.
For now, the path of least resistance for me (and MANY others) is to stick with PGSQL. Changing DBs is not the big deal you might think, since I have access to all the above-mentioned tools - I could change to MySQL in just a few hours of work (and then a few more hours for the imports to finish/propogate!), just like I switched to PGSQL when MySQL's timestamp limitation became a big problem. No big deal, and I generally keep everything DB-agnostic. Switching to an unsupported (by my favourite libraries) database would be a very big deal, however, and I just don't have the resources, or - frankly - a good enough reason.
Thanks for the suggestion though and I will definitely keep an eye on the project.
Yeah, great solution. So now I have to implement readers and writers in every application that accesses that DB. Want to search in a date range? I need to write something to generate a query using the custom time storage, and then to re-convert the results on data return.. basically I'm writing my own driver. In multiple languages. That makes the custom view seem like an elegant, simple solution.
Or, MySQL could just support subsecond timestamps in the common format like everyone else. How hard can it be?!
I would like to use MySQL instead of Postgres - it's easier for me to install, maintain, and just plain understand. I don't like how PG does things a lot of the time and find it needlessly complex. But because MySQL lacks the seemingly basic ability to store a timestamp with better than second accuracy, I can't, because I have to store log events which are often more than one a second - much more - and I need to know exactly when. Milliseconds would be fine, microseconds would be great.
MySQL currently recommends some ridiculous hack where you strip the sub-second information from the time you send it and store it in another column, then write some kind of view which combines them back. What? I am not doing that to implement what I consider to be basic functionality! Do you remember how my motivation for switching is because I want things to be simple? Writing weird multi-column time recombination hacks is not my idea of simple.
Replication improvements, XML parsing, great features all - but please just give us timestamps with accuracy better than a second? A lot can and does happen in less than a second and I need to be able to log it with accuracy!
What are practical steps geeks like us can do to slow down, if only slightly, this creeping totalitarianism?
1. Many of us are webmasters. Buy an SSL certificate and run your sites through TLS *by default*. Yes it uses more CPU. Do it anyway.
2. Start reminding your friends to use PGP or S/MIME for the email. Start turning up the urgency, week by week, until you finally demand that they do it or you can't talk them by email anymore.
3. Start acting surprised if your friends don't use any other forms of encryption - disk, etc. Don't layer it on too thick. Just enough to start to create a doubt in their mind that they're doing it right.
For us, encryption is normal and everyday (I hope so anyway!). Our tasks is to use our positions as tech "influencers" - either in positions of direct power or in the respect and regard of friends - to discreetly push the theory and practise of encryption and privacy into the normal lives of those around us.
The days grow dark indeed. Just a week ago France became maybe the first large rich country to start systematically blocking websites at the country level. And now this. It's tempting to withdraw into depression and fatalism but these measures will be implemented with technology and can be defeated with it too. Encryption, VPNs, mesh routing - it's all within our reach; even installed on everyone's computers! And it's time for us to do what we can, and start educating those around us to do what's right.
Now, having said that, I'm capable of shell scripting, so maybe PAC is easier for the point-n-grunt admins...... Totally agreed. I haven't been a Windows admin for over 4 years now and I can still remember how I could do this in about 5 minutes. I can only assume he's using a domain controller, the login script would be about 3 lines long.
My answer to the OP's question "why haven't they fixed this bug" is "because no-one cares, and if you had any skill at your job at all, you wouldn't either".
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever, jerk.
More like that it was a real grey area and no-one knew what the rules were, or if the American bill of rights extended to foreigners (or even citizens) in the customs area.
Not for encryption keys, but there are *plenty* of stories of detentions and, more often, send-backs and equipment seizures of/from foreigners from US shores for very flimsy reasons. I've seen several on slashdot, look around a bit.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say "thank god! an end to the encryption related detentions!", I was trying to say "it's good to know what the actual law is and that it's not just going to be up to some overzealous customs guy".
I think this kind of thing will do a lot to restore people's peace of mind. That's all I meant.
I know a lot of people who were getting very nervous about even *visiting* the USA. Think they're overreacting and melodramatic? Think again - all we hear are stories of how foreigners, with no rights, detained by customs, forced to incriminate themselves, forced to give up encryption keys on threat of indefinite detention in stateless legal no-mans-land .. how reasonable it is to worry about it all *that* much is questionable but it's undeniably been a bad trend for a long time.
This, though - an unequivocal restoration of the right to silence, at a border no less - is a *very* welcome development. Let's hope it's the first in a long run of "restoration" decisions as the pendulum swings back from the terrorism bubble.
Really happy to see this. I'm not American, but I was taking no joy whatsoever in watching the previous slide. I'm feeling pretty joyful to see this kind of thing, though - separation of powers worked in the end!
Here's to a few more key decisions like this. Go USA.
Shit. Posting to nullify my accidental "overrated" mod.
I'd meant to mod +1, Funny.
Wow, rich white guys who own yachts have a positive experience with the police? Who woulda thunk it.
But notice how quickly their behaviour changed when conspicuous proof of your elevated status was not at hand. That's right, sitting in an interview room for hours while your kids asked their grandparents where you were.
I'm a rich white guy myself, and funnily enough I've never been pulled over in my BMW. But dress down a bit and you'll notice their attitude do a 180 degrees turn. Look a little bit down on your luck and they treat you like utter scum. Maybe try it sometime.
9/11 came a lot closer than a lot of people want to admit to achieving that second goal. The world economy tettered on the brink of a total collapse for several weeks.
Jesus Christ, over-dramatic much? *Total collapse*?! Even if the entire city of New York had been nuked into radioactive glass the world economy wouldn't have come close to total collapse. You think the farmer milking his cows for my breakfast tomorrow is going to just give up and shoot himself because some financial market in the USA is no more? Give me a break.
The whole continent of North America could disappear into a black hole tomorrow and the world would go on. Sure, there would be massive disruption, stockmarket crashes, years of setback, corporate bankruptcies, bank runs, etc. But the world would go on and after 10 years you wouldn't even be able to tell.
And the most important financial city in the world, for your information, isn't even NYC - it's London.
America has less than 5% of the world's population. Sure, it has the largest concentration of wealth in a single country - for now. It's still the single most important country financially, but nothing like the titan it was even 10 years ago. Geeze, look outside the window once in a while, why don't you.
Microsoft's chronic insecuity could very well end up destroying our very Civilization.
I don't know exactly what type of drugs you're on, but here's a bit of advice anyway: take less of them.
There have already been about a million comments about aerobic vs. weight training exercise, so I won't repeat that too much, but one thing I "discovered" which really helped is the Les Mills group exercise programs, especially my favourite, Body Combat.
It's basically doing martial arts moves to dance music. I'm a highly self-conscious introvert as well, so I could never get into any group exercise in the past, but BC is kind of "cool enough" that I feel less like some dick doing aerobics and more like a Shaolin monk doing a monastery training routine.
You might find it a little intimidating at first, so I would recommend, uh, grabbing some of the recent videos via bittorrent *cough* so you can check it out and get up to speed on the kind of moves you'll be seeing. I recommend grabbing the latest (36) off mininova or something. Watch it, go along with the moves until you're comfortable, and then find a gym nearby that supports it.
You might be surprised by how fun it is - and you can't beat doing it at a gym, with the super loud music and peer pressure to put in the effort. You will feel a lot less gay doing martial arts moves to music than the usual aerobics fare. Plus the people you'll find there are also usually pretty cool.
Plus, as everyone said already, ride everywhere you possibly can. If you can't ride in your area, vote with your feet (wheels?) and *move*. When I used to live in Japan I was about 5kg less than my current (western) location simply because riding everywhere was actually more convenient than any other method. That is the way it should be and now I try to match my lifestyle to the Japanese "experience" as much as possible. There's a reason fat Japanese are rare; less cars, basically.
Don't eat food which is ridiculously laden with fat - especially savoury fatty foods which are deceptive because you don't think of them as sweets. Chief offenders are things like pizza and crisps. Any food which is actually physically heavy is suspect and should probably be limited. Turn down all of that, and turn up the salads, and you might be surprised just how easy it is to keep the weight off and stay decently trim.
Eat reasonable food, ride or walk around as much as possible, and go to the gym a couple of times a week - chances are you'll have lost the weight and keep it off pretty quickly.
Seriously? Mine does (Willoughby LGA, Sydney NSW Australia). Hell, you can make requests for them to buy things and if they think it's any good they usually do. The nuts thing is they then ring you and tell you it's in and reserved for you, you just go pick it up!
The problem is if you're looking for something specific - if you didn't suggest it and it's popular it's probably out, and then they charge a "booking fee" of $2 so you may as well just rent it. But since they generally choose reasonably meritorious movies anyway, there's usually something decent there - I often go and look at what they've got if I want to watch something but don't have anything particular in mind. Pretty happy with it so far.
Anyway if anyone was looking for someone to thank for the fact that Chatswood library now has the complete Ghost in the Shell SAC series on DVD, I await your effusive praise ; )
So you're saying that advanced civilisations have abandoned software patents? Sheesh, tell me something I don't know : )
Science and reasoning?
You talk like we've discovered everything there is to know. I like how you used the word "feasible", though, it's very telling. Superluminal travel is indeed unfeasible, for us, right now.
But just think about what we don't know. We have no unified theory of the universe or even fricking gravity. We can predict it but we can't explain it. We don't know why qusntum entanglement works. We don't even know what comprises something like 90% of the estimated mass of the universe. To summarise, we don't know jack shit.
Quantum state is superluminal. That's a chink in your Relativity armour wide enough to drive a bus through. If quantum state can do it, rest assured, something else can too.
I pride myself on being a fairly rational person, and I am hardly an expert on quantum mechanics or indeed spacetime theory. But I do know enough to know that we just don't know anything. I am not trying to convince you that superluminal travel *is* possible. I am trying to convince you that our current knowledge is not even close to being able to rule it out, or make any comment really, one way or the other.
You should read a bit before you act so dismissively. Some of this shit will blow your mind. You do know that mass curves spacetime, right? In other words, it is *possible* to curve spacetime? In other words you can probably do it deliberately, given enough energy?
Our understanding of all this is at about the same level as a 17th century alchemists' understanding of the nature of matter. They were beginning to suspect that, given a ridiculous amount of energy and the right conditions, you might, just might, say, refine aluminium into a pure form. Well whaddya know, here we are, 300 years later, typing on our computers made of refined aluminium, and thinking that given a ludicrous amount of energy and the right conditions you might, just might, be able to curve spacetime enough to enable a specified object to make a superluminal jump.
Give us 500 years.
But I do agree that UFO theories are in all likelihood BS. Wishful thinking, like I said, from people with the need to believe humans are important in the universe.
Yeah, fair enough. I think I came off a little strong, sorry if I sounded arrogant/unrealistic.
I just wish we could fix these fucking conditions. I feel guilty when I walk past someone in a wheelchair. I feel guilty when I see some poor sap with a blind stick tapping his way down the street. I wish we could just fix them.
Wheelchair ramps and braille elevator buttons are pretty weak fucking sauce. I just want to fix these horrible problems and get people on their feet and living normal lives again. And it really just pisses me off when we just accept these kinds of ruinous injuries. And, worse, the PC industry seems to have gotten it into its head that such debilitating conditions are normal! Have you seen the ads? "Don't dis my ability"! Fucking hell man we should be *fixing* this shit, not just trying to brainwash the afflicted that somehow not being able to walk kicks ass.
Sure we can't give up on the wheelchair ramps (as a temporary measure) but how about equal expenditure on the basic research? Pretty please?
I have some doctor friends, so I'm well aware of how hard the problems are. But that also gave me an all-too-good understanding of how scattered, disorganised, ad hoc and directionless the research is.
I don't give a shit how many ramps they have to roll up and down. Every single person in a wheelchair is a person we have failed. Society, and medical science, has failed and now they're trapped in a fucking rolling chair for the rest of their lives.
That REALLY sucks and I just wish we could do more about it.
Oh come on. Do you really believe humanity, as of 2008, has discovered every secret of science there is? We have reached the universal pinnacle of transportation technology? Nothing we can't do right now, today, is possible, full stop end of story?
Give me a break. Our current technology does not even scratch the surface. 99% of our transportation is still powered by burning oil, for christ's sake!
Think how far humankind has come in the last 1000 years. Now imagine where we might be in another 1000. And another. And another. And another few million.
Do you really think that 1 million AD humans don't know a thing or two about the structure of spacetime that we don't? You sound like a medieval knight telling me, with absolute certainty, that humans will never fly because we are heavier than air.
I couldn't agree more. These people stating with such certainty that there is no such thing as extraterrestrial life are nuts. My view is that people who seriously believe we are alone in the universe just don't understand the numbers.
You "unbelievers" do know how many stars there are in the universe, don't you? It's around 10^21. Do you have any comprehension at all of what kind of a number that is?
The chance of us, out of the countless trillions of star systems in the universe and over billions of years, somehow being the only place to develop any form of intelligent life is so remote I can't take it seriously. Of course other systems have intelligent life. It's as statistically certain as the sun coming up tomorrow. Probably a few orders of magnitude more so.
People talk about fools who "believe" in aliens but they're believers in a much more unlikely scenario, IMO. I don't know why this insistence that we're "alone" is so common - some relic of Christian "we are god's favourites" or something, maybe.
We haven't even made it to the nearest star, FFS. Who knows what is out there. We certainly don't and anyone who claims to - or claims to know what is NOT out there - is talking out their ass.
Not that I give this astronaut much credence, of course. Why would an advanced alien species bother with earth? Believing that they do without any solid evidence to back it up is just another kind of "humans are important" wishful thinking, IMO.
No, but we could at least throw SOME money at it. How much is being spent doing serious federally-funded medical research to cure, say, paraplegia/quadroplegia? Well, I don't know if there's even a program. There is natural progress in surgery but hardly a concerted effort. And no private companies are willing to spend money on medical cures for people who could never afford to pay a proportionate cost for the treatment.
The ADA, on the other hand, is estimated to cost $10-20 billionn for retrofitting public buildings and infrastructure alone.
Source: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-158.html
(mind you I do not agree with CATO. They simply have the numbers on their site)
Imagine what we could achieve with a tenth of that money "thrown" at a concerted effort to develop techniques and technology to heal spinal damage.
We can't solve everything overnight, sure, and money isn't pixie dust that just magics these probelms away - but we could at least make some organised effort.
I am not suggesting we make the disabled sit around not being able to get into buildings, of course. We should find a balance, though, between trying to work around their disabilities while accepting they are disabled as some kind of "act of god", and putting some serious effort into trying to fix the problem at its root.
You say we can't leave the disabled waiting outside buildings they're unable to roll into. But how many would rather just get up and walk up the stairs?
You know what? I hate concessions to "disabled" people. To me they seem to telegraph this notion that it's OK people are disabled, and we all just have to work around their disabilities.
That is bullshit. The problem is not the access, it's the disabilities in the first place. I often wonder that if half the money that's poured into making buildings (and web-sites) "disability friendly" was instead directed into fast-track R&D for actually *curing* the disabilities, whether we'd be able to solve the real problem in a much, MUCH better way.
I hate disabilities. I hate the whole idea that someone bangs their spine in the wrong place and suddenly they can never walk again. The solution to their problem isn't installing wheelchair ramps all over the place, it's getting the disabled walking again.
And yet we must spend 100x the amount on making everything "disability friendly" compared to research on actually fixing the problems. It's the wrong way round, it's the coward's way, and that really pisses me off.
"Official" one from Feb 2005:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=8523
And here's another one going back to Nov 2003, which was strangely marked as a dupe of the above:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=1764
Should have put those in the original comment; apologies for my laziness.
Yeah, I've considered that and even played around with it a bit. But my goal here is to reduce complexity, and implementing that kind of solution (for multiple apps in multiple languages) would have the exact opposite effect. It's far easier to simply stick with PGSQL.
My enemy is complexity and vendor lock-in, in any form. Implementing the custom MySQL view would be 1 step forward (ease of administration) and two steps back (custom config). Doing what you suggest would be one step forward, 10 steps back and would require pervasive code and library changes!
I'm all for hacking around problems I find and then sharing them for others to use - I've released many patches and how-tos to allow Ruby on Rails to use UUIDs as its primary keys, for example. But there's also the consideration of whether something *should* be hacked around and papered over. I am personally of the opinion that nobody, including me, should be forced to come up with low-level workarounds to what I consider to be basic functionality holes in MySQL. The work of supporting sub-second timestamps is by all rights MySQL's job. Everyone else does it and I can't for the life of me understand why they haven't.
So that's my reasoning - I am sure some will disagree, but I hope I've made a fairly rational argument.
I have checked out Firebird in the past and it looks great - but there's a huge chicken and egg problem. Basically, to adopt a DB requires that it be supported in the languages I use - and for scripting this kind of thing I use Ruby. I can't find any firebird support, native or otherwise, for Ruby, let alone support in the more high-level libraries like ActiveRecord or DataMapper.
I'm not trying to put down the project - it looks great. But I can't possibly afford the time or resources to develop all my own libraries from scratch. That might sound selfish, like I'm all take and no give, and expect everything to be packaged nicely just for me - but I don't think so, I contribute where I can. I just can't do that kind of thing alone. I have deadlines and a budget, and to try to trailblaze a new path supporting a newish, as-yet pretty obscure DB would be suicidal.
If firebird really pans out and becomes a (widely accepted) viable alternative to the "majors" I will be there contributing patches and doing what I can. But I can't be the lone crusader who starts down that path. To be brutally honest, judging from past experience, it will probably have to be the developers themselves who start that ball rolling.
For now, the path of least resistance for me (and MANY others) is to stick with PGSQL. Changing DBs is not the big deal you might think, since I have access to all the above-mentioned tools - I could change to MySQL in just a few hours of work (and then a few more hours for the imports to finish/propogate!), just like I switched to PGSQL when MySQL's timestamp limitation became a big problem. No big deal, and I generally keep everything DB-agnostic. Switching to an unsupported (by my favourite libraries) database would be a very big deal, however, and I just don't have the resources, or - frankly - a good enough reason.
Thanks for the suggestion though and I will definitely keep an eye on the project.
Use a double and store the timestamp yourself?
Yeah, great solution. So now I have to implement readers and writers in every application that accesses that DB. Want to search in a date range? I need to write something to generate a query using the custom time storage, and then to re-convert the results on data return .. basically I'm writing my own driver. In multiple languages. That makes the custom view seem like an elegant, simple solution.
Or, MySQL could just support subsecond timestamps in the common format like everyone else. How hard can it be?!
I would like to use MySQL instead of Postgres - it's easier for me to install, maintain, and just plain understand. I don't like how PG does things a lot of the time and find it needlessly complex. But because MySQL lacks the seemingly basic ability to store a timestamp with better than second accuracy, I can't, because I have to store log events which are often more than one a second - much more - and I need to know exactly when. Milliseconds would be fine, microseconds would be great.
MySQL currently recommends some ridiculous hack where you strip the sub-second information from the time you send it and store it in another column, then write some kind of view which combines them back. What? I am not doing that to implement what I consider to be basic functionality! Do you remember how my motivation for switching is because I want things to be simple? Writing weird multi-column time recombination hacks is not my idea of simple.
Replication improvements, XML parsing, great features all - but please just give us timestamps with accuracy better than a second? A lot can and does happen in less than a second and I need to be able to log it with accuracy!
I don't think I'd want to meet the girl in their signup page without some heavy weapons ..
http://jlove.com/register.aspx
Or do Jewish guys normally go for the "extraterrestrial look"? I don't know, I liked Natalie Portman ..
it does allow us to spend more time using our brains for other things than schemes for getting laid.
Some would argue that every achievement in the history of mankind is the result of schemes for getting laid ...
Funnily enough, there is a town in Australia called Eromanga!
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=eromanga&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=76.967897,110.917969&ie=UTF8&z=8&iwloc=addr
My Japanese friends all think it's suitably hilarious.
What are practical steps geeks like us can do to slow down, if only slightly, this creeping totalitarianism?
1. Many of us are webmasters. Buy an SSL certificate and run your sites through TLS *by default*. Yes it uses more CPU. Do it anyway.
2. Start reminding your friends to use PGP or S/MIME for the email. Start turning up the urgency, week by week, until you finally demand that they do it or you can't talk them by email anymore.
3. Start acting surprised if your friends don't use any other forms of encryption - disk, etc. Don't layer it on too thick. Just enough to start to create a doubt in their mind that they're doing it right.
For us, encryption is normal and everyday (I hope so anyway!). Our tasks is to use our positions as tech "influencers" - either in positions of direct power or in the respect and regard of friends - to discreetly push the theory and practise of encryption and privacy into the normal lives of those around us.
The days grow dark indeed. Just a week ago France became maybe the first large rich country to start systematically blocking websites at the country level. And now this. It's tempting to withdraw into depression and fatalism but these measures will be implemented with technology and can be defeated with it too. Encryption, VPNs, mesh routing - it's all within our reach; even installed on everyone's computers! And it's time for us to do what we can, and start educating those around us to do what's right.
My answer to the OP's question "why haven't they fixed this bug" is "because no-one cares, and if you had any skill at your job at all, you wouldn't either".