Yeah, the Republicans keep upping the friction in political discourse.
When they were in power until 2006, they often negotiated together to get enough votes to pass the thing by themselves, and then bring it to the floor and pass it without any Democratic input at all.
That is not how things used to work. Things used to get argued on the floor. People would make agreements with the other party, to vote for their amendment, if some other amendment was included. Instead the Republicans negotiated in secret until they got exactly enough votes to pass. The bill would show up on the floor, Republicans would, in unison, vote down all Democratic amendments, and pass the thing.
When they lost all branches of government in 2008, they then started filibustering everything. Everything. They even managed to pull some Democrats onto the filibuster concept.
That is not how things used to work. If you didn't like a bill, you used to vote against it, not prohibit it from being voted on at all. Filibusters were reserved for extreme outrage, and very short term. But the Republicans decided that 'filibustering' was the new 'voting against'. Hell, even noncontroversial stuff got filibustered...there was one guy whose Senate appointment got held up a year and half...and finally the Senate voted for him, 96 to 3 or something.
Now that Republicans have gained control of the House, they've decided that the budget, which must pass, is the correct place for ideological fights, including flights they already lost, like the ACA.
That is not how things used to work. If you wanted to repeal a law, if you wanted to defund something, you proposed it as an actual law, or at worst an amendment to something unrelated to try to sneak it in. You didn't start adding riders to the actual budget itself.
The Republicans have constantly decided that precedent be damned, civil discourse be damned, they're doing whatever the fuck they want to do that seems to be 'legal'.
If you have a problem with Planned Parenthood, perhaps you should step in and build a nationwide network of clinics in poor areas providing reproductive health services to women who otherwise have no access to them.
No?
Well, perhaps we could have the government do that? It would only cost, oh, several billion dollars to build such places, and of course, cost more to run them because Planned Parenthood had a lot of donors covering costs.
No?
Oh, oh, I know. We could just stop funding them and let women die. I can't see any objection to that. At least not on the part of the Republicans.
I think I shall leave you with an analogy for all you feebleminded fools out there:
We are a struggling household. We don't make enough to pay our armed security guard to follow us around, and we're way in debt.
However, fool like you have, herp derp, discovered that we're spending about $430 a month on upkeep of the house next door. You see, the house next door is owned by an absent owner, who gives us $500 a month to maintain the house, plus covers the time we spend ourselves.
We've been using that extra $70 a month to keep from having to take out as many loans to cover the costs of our armed guard, who is more and more insistent he needs new guns and bullets, although we technically are eventually required to spend it on the house next door.
So, herp derp, why are we spending so much on the house next door? Let's just go to that guy, tell him we won't do it anymore, and keep the entire $500 a month for ourselves! WOoooooo!
...what do you mean, he's not going to keep paying us to maintain it if we don't, you know, maintain it? Oh, and he wants all the money we borrowed back?
Social. Security. Is. Not. An. Expense. Cutting it cannot help the budget. Anyone who even slightly pretends it can either a fucking goddamn retard who shouldn't be allowed to vote, or a deliberate liar.
Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars.
Uh, no it's not. The debt is 14 trillion. That is how much we owe.
The deficit is how much we spend each year over revenue. It's currently about $2 trillion, despite the few idiotic cuts the Republicans are pretending is the end of the world if we don't pass.
Interestingly, you're also wrong. 2010 numbers aren't out yet, but 2009's figures say that Defense was 20% of the budget, whereas Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlements except Social Security came to 33%. (Social Security came to an additional 21%.) ALL interest (remember, the government doesn't break out interest by what the loan was for) comes to 8%.
And here is THE LIE. Repeat it enough, and everyone believes it.
Hey, idjit. Those programs are self funded. You can't cut Social Security and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut.
Same with Medicare. Medicare is insurance...people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying fucking Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.
Both those programs take in more money than they spend, or at least, they take in more money on average. (Right now, they're both struggling, but luckily they have money saved up.) Are you suggesting that we should continue to operate the tax collecting part of social security and medicare without actually providing the service? No? Then what the fuck are you suggesting, then, when you claim they're a bigger dent on the budget than the military?
The only part of the budget that can be 'cut' is the part that takes general tax revenue and spends it on things, and the biggest part of that the military, by like 70%. You can't cut things that collect their own money and somehow end up with more money.
dd in multi-year costs of Medicare and Medicaid (like interest on THAT money.)
Christ, you're stupid. Medicare, like Social Security, has collected more money than it spend, so it has a negative impact on interest, because the Federal government uses money from it, at no interest, instead of borrowing from banks.
Medicaid, OTOH, while not self-funded, costs $208 billion a year. Which is probably about ten times the yearly operating costs of the 20 B-2 Bombers. (Which are, of course, a very small amount of the armed forced.) Considering that US is paying $5 trillion in interest a year on $14 trillion, interest on $208 billion would be something like, oh, $70 billion.
And then there's the triple/quad-stores like jena, 4store, virtuoso which allow you to answer questions from your data that you couldn't even begin to imagine doing with SQL.,
Here, we're running into the stupidity of the name NoSQL. What promoters normally mean by that are 'non-relational'.
From what I understand, the databases you just listed are relational. Triplestores just use a simpler query language, and a simpler database layout, allowing for much greater speed.
Our contractor has, however, discovered some irony with MongoDB's "schemaless" claim: unless you can pick an extremely finite set of fields to be indexed, you can't actually do arbitrary queries on arbitrary documents... in other words you need to decide on a schema:-)
Document stores are great for storing documents and indexing metadata and the entire content. They are not great at indexing random parts of it.
I have a feeling if you actually got that indexed, you'd be at the point where the solution would be heavier than just using SQL.
We've been doing a project with MongoDB (no, we're not using it as our authoritative data store, but neither are we using SQL for that), which we could have done with an SQL DB, but honestly we didn't have the resources to do so. We have less than a million records, hardly a huge amount of data - our data is arbitrarily structured, fitting the document-object model perfectly, and makes for absolutely meaningless SQL tables (with many joins, stored procedures so that we could try to service an obscure perlish query language).
See, the thing is, I don't think you know what's going on. No one, at least not me, has a problem with people using a document store to store an insane amount of unstructured documents and trying to pull some sense out of them. That's what they're for.
But there are people out these who have decided to use a document store, because NoSQL is 'better' than SQL, or they're just lazy, so they lump their data together and throw it in one. Or they decide that their user database should be kept in HBase. And then people like me have to deal with the results of that shitpile.
No one here is against non-relational databases, we're against the idiotic 'NoSQL movement' that has randomly sprung up where fools decided to use something besides perfectly functional non-relational databases.
People switch to non-relational databases when what you're trying to do doesn't work well in a relational one, and that's fine. Sadly, we have a lot of people out there with no database knowledge who have decided to switch because NoSQL is 'newer and better' or because they simply don't understand how to make relational databases so throw lumps of data in an object store.
And this is exactly the sort of BULLSHIT I expect from the NoSQL crowd,
You think a) SQL and NoSQL are functionally equivalent, and b) that NoSQL is a 'more modern' version.
Hey, other posters, this sort of mindset is exactly what I was talking about as my actual problem. Exactly, right there. I couldn't put it better myself. This guy thinks NoSQL is the same as SQL, except it works slightly better.
And I'll freely admit my Space Shuttle Crawler analogy was a bit silly. NoSQL is more akin to a tractor trailer. When you need one, you need one...and it's a goddamn stupid car for a person to drive off a dealer lot and attempt to use to as a passenger car.
Actually, you could say that NoSQL attempts to encompass tractor trailers, actual tractors, bulldozers, and the space shuttle crawler, making it not that useful a category to start with, and still resulting in people making rather nonsensical decisions because they watch too many NoSQL commercials on TV.
Looking at it as just SQL vs noSQL is simply ridiculous. The noSQL camp could be anything from simple local key-value stores, to distributed document stores, to graph db's, etc, etc. There is no such thing as 'noSQL' technology, just as there is no 'non-microsoft' technology - there's a whole ecosystem out there of other solutions that can make a lot more sense in particular scenarios.
Dude, it's not the 'anti-NoSQL' guys who decided to look at it this way. As I've repeatedly mentioned, there are plenty of reasons to use non-relational DBs. Everyone used to be perfectly happy.
Then Google ran into the limitations of SQL, and wrote a non-relational databases. And somewhere, somehow, a bunch of people heard of that and decided that they shall call themselves NoSQL and promote themselves as some sort of insane 'rebel alliance' fighting the lame, confusing, and stodgy SQL people, (It has to be cool if Google's using it) and this has resulted utter nonsense as people try to use non-relational databases for things utterly unsuited to it, but instead suited for, duh, relational databases. Or, you know, just files.
The post above this one talks about using a document store for config files. Not in a hypothetical sense, but in an 'this is already happening' sense.
No one here is against non-relational databases. We, or at least I, am against the 'NoSQL movement' which seems to be promoting non-relational databases in utterly absurd places, or at least causing that to happen.
As I tried to explain in my other posts, I have no problem with people using dbm libraries, if people just need to store some random data. Just because NoSQL has retroactively claimed such things under their term doesn't mean they are as useless as the entire movement. If NoSQL was just a new way to refer to those things, I'd have no problem at all.
But I do have a problem when people use HBase or Hypertable, instead of an SQL server, for any non-huge project. This has all the disadvantages of an SQL server, combined with all the disadvantages of a dbm library, and absolutely no advantages that any normal person would be able to take advantages of.
And I do have a problem with document stores, because I suspect that 99% of the time, people are attempting to solve a problem that would be better solved by, you know, the actual document store called 'the file system'. That's where you store damn configuration files. If you want to keep config options in memory, how about, I dunno, making a struct and actually keeping the values in memory?
NoSQL object servers, and NoSQL document servers, are almost always solutions looking for problems. Yes, I know that they were both created for useful real reasons, and I have no problem with using them for that reason. I do have a problem about the strange cult that's arisen around them that attempt to use them for utter nonsense, like using a database to store config files, or using an NoSQL object server to store a forum.
Actually, thinking about it, gdbm, and I assume tokyocabinet, are not technically relational, it's just everyone uses them as such by storing identically shaped records and attaching hash tables to them so people can find things.
What people are complaining about here are things like HBase and Hypertable, not dbm libraries.
They have all the disadvantages of dbm libraries (Like non-records taking up space), and all the disadvantages of SQL servers (Like having to copy things around in memory), and extra disadvantages of neither (like 'eventual' updates, until which you will be inconsistent).
The sole advantages is they can be huge. Really, really huge.
And I'm still not convinced that it wouldn't work better in SQL. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't make relational tables like you have to use NoSQL.
NoSQL seems just an argument in laziness. It seems like a weird mix of caching and unwillingness to design databases correctly.
But I got sick of that argument, so I just with the idea that you need NoSQL for massive amounts of data...
....which still means that almost no one should use it.
Uh, I know you're trying to push NoSQL, but under no definition of 'toy' is included a billion data points.
In my opinion, it's worthwhile to be familiar with both, and to be able to choose the right one for every task.
Yes, just like taxi drivers should be familiar with passenger cars and the 3000 tonne Space Shuttle Crawler. Because sometimes people need to move the space shuttle.
It's just obvious. Everyone should aim to be skilled in the actual tool everyone uses all the time, and an incredibly specialized tool that is helpful for impossibly large tasks that almost no one actually does.
NoSQL solutions are certainly not the best tool for every job, but neither are normal relational databases.
Oh, I agree. You just try moving the space shuttle with a normal car. Or like your grad project, where you moved an entire building.
I cannot figure out why people just know how to drive a car. Learning how to drive the space shuttle crawler would be so much more useful, and at the very least they should know both.
tokyocabinet and other dbm are not what people are talking about when they say NoSQL. 'NoSQL' does not mean 'database engine that doesn't use SQL'.
NoSQL would be better called 'NoRel'. NoSQL is a non-relational database. And NoSQL is only available as a database server, which I assure you have no less memory requirements than SQL servers. (And if you're having trouble imagining what the hell a 'non-relational database' is, or would be used for, you're not alone.)
Whereas dbm libraries like tokyocabinet are, in fact, relational, they just don't use SQL. (And the server is linked in.) No one has any problem with embedded dbm libraries, SQL or otherwise. They are not NoSQL, they are just not SQL.
There are a few things with SQL that could be done better, and there's still some standardization needed. I'd like to see a SQL 2012 standard or something.
But you're entirely right. There is one place nosql makes sense, and it's gigantic data stores like facebook and google, where the quantity is overwhelming, and the quality isn't that important...it's okay miss a few things, and you're looking for sorta-random stuff. That is why NoSQL was invented.
No one should ever 'choose' to use NoSQL...if you're on the size of a project that needs NoSQL, I promise you you are nowhere near that decision...it will be decided between the seven project architects as they buy thirty servers to run the damn thing. That's the guys who have a legit need, or at least it's a legit option, of using NoSQL.
It's not useful for any other system in existence.
It's especially funny when toy projects try to use NoSQL. It's like idiots trying to run their watches off geothermal power. 'It's free power! FROM THE EARTH!'
Dude, you're using half an amp, perhaps you should learn how to use a watch battery instead of driving 2 mile polls into the ground as you walk around. It's not like SQL is fucking rocket science. In fact, right now, NoSQL is actually more complicated to use.
I read somewhere that the quote by Feyman is actually about the fact that quantum mechanics is impossible to visualize for people who have learned to deal with a macroscopic universe that follows Newton's laws. Unlike relativity, which is easy enough to visualize 'good enough' if you remove a spacial dimension and replace it with time.
Even Feyman couldn't visualize it.
And we should probably consider every single quote Feyman ever made as 'out of context'.;)
Evolution is a good example of the results of science being inexplicably at that point, and proven later.
Darwin had absolutely no evidence of genes, no idea how they were transferred from parent to child. Mendel was working on that, but failed to actually tell anyone. I'm not talking about DNA, which was much later, I'm talking about basic stuff like 'recessive' and 'dominate' genes.
Darwin didn't know about any of that, he had no way for 'slightly taller giraffes' to have 'slightly taller children'. His theory just predicted the existence of some sort of genetic transfer from parents to child before all that, untouched until being passed on, somehow merging both parents aspects together, and with random minor changes.
Which was, tada, proven correct. DNA does that, with small mutations.
When everyone involved in article is a idiot...and the previous posters don't notice it, giving everyone an fucking page of crap. It's astonishing how no slashdot readers KNOW WHAT SCIENCE IS.
Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?
Those things ARE NOT SCIENCE. Those are the result of science.
This entire article is incoherent nonsense. No one has to 'explain' science....science is trivial to understand. Here it is. Here is the entirety of all of science, stolen from Wikipedia. There are probably better ways to phrase it, but this is good enoug:
1. Use your experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Look for previous explanations. If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.
2. Form a conjecture: When nothing else is yet known, try to state an explanation, to someone else, or to your notebook.
3. Deduce a prediction from that explanation: If you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?
4. Test: Look for the opposite of each consequence in order to disprove 2.
That. Is. Fucking. Science. That's it. It can be explained and demonstrated in a day to anyone.
Oh, before anyone starts using your results, you have to tell other people what you do, so they learn what you have learned, and can repeat what you did. That is not, strictly speaking, 'science', but it's expected to produce output that way instead of just announcing it.
There is no quantum physics in it, there is no string theory, there is no Schroedingerâ(TM)s equation. Those things are what people have come up with using science. Those are the result of science, they are no more science than you are driving around in a Ford manufacturing plant or eating a kitchen.
As for the output of science? We don't accept it on faith, we accept it because it seems to work. Saying it's 'accepted on faith' is like saying we 'buy cars on faith in internal combustion'. Uh, not really.
Please note that it's the Republicans in this case. It'll be the Democrats next time.
No it won't. This attack is exactly the sort of 'welfare queen' attack the Republicans have been doing forever.
The Democrats, meanwhile, just last year passed a bill making it illegal for insurance companies to discriminate based on the existing health of a person, including their weight.
I know the right claims the Democrats will do something like this, but people should realize that is what psychologists call 'projection'. Restricting government services so 'undesirable' people can't use them is almost solely a Republican habit, especially when those services are aimed at the poor.
In the rare cases that Democrats go after undesirable behavior, like smoking, they just go after the behavior, making it harder to do.
Whether or not they should be going after smoking is a separate issue, but they actually ban it in certain areas and whatnot. For the poor and the rich.
Whereas Republicans always step in with a 'tax', so it's only poor people who can't afford that bad behavior. Because, in the end, it's not the smokers, or the obese, or drug dealers(1), or whatever that are the 'undesirables'...it's those damn poor people.
1) Remember the whole 'deny student loans to people with drug convictions'? Aka, 'deny college to poor people with drug convictions, but not rich people with drug convictions'?
Same here. If that's what Bush was, I'm almost exactly the same size as him, normally about 10 pounds heavier, although I can break sub-200 if I lay off the Mountain Dew for a few days. I actually am in bad shape, because I have a congenital heart condition and can't exert myself more than short periods of time.
But with regard to weight, I could maybe ditch 20 pounds in some ideal world. I can, right now, feel my ribs....I can't magically get a smaller torso!
People need to realize that 'overweight' and 'obese' aren't the same thing, and that the NIH's measurement of that is exceptionally silly.
And also that a lot of people are overweight for reasons outside their control, not just thyroid. (A thyroid problem is probably the only reason for actual obesity, though.) I probably have a few added pounds because I am 'lazy' and the only exercise I get is walking...but that's because if I do anything that gets my heart-rate up, it, um, doesn't work right and I overheat, get nauseated, and almost pass out.
However, we don't need to sit here and argue like this is a serious law that could be passed elsewhere. This is the Republicans, once again, attacking poor people. That's pretty much it.
Just like 99.9999% of programmers out there, who work on server processes or web site backends or business applications or commercial development haven't.
No one, I mean no one, builds fucking physics simulations. There are like ten of those in all of existence at various video game companies, and that's it. Maybe 200 programmers work on the physics part of those in the entire world. That's it.
That's always the go-to response for 'Calculus is pointless for CS majors', but it's utter nonsense.
By your logic, programmers need a car on auto repair, because I promise you that more programmers, worldwide, are working on the embedded computers inside cars than on physics simulators.
The assumption that correlation and causation are interchangeable is so rampant in modern society that in any given story it is probably that someone has made that error.
Just because the assumption is rampant, and everyone gets it wrong, does not mean everyone is getting it wrong because the assumption is rampant.
Perhaps assuming they are the same thing when reading is indicative of people generally being idiots who can't reason their way out of a wet paper bag, whereas writing it wrong is simple because the person's audience is an idiot and they want to write sensational news pieces.
correlation != causation;)
Seriously, though, you're right. I read 'Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success' and said 'that's one of the stupidest thing I've ever read'.
In my school, at least, whether or not you took Algebra II or not was the most obvious indicator if you were in the college prep track or the vocational track. Making all the vocational students take Algebra II wouldn't change anything.
Dude, I've never passed Calculus, and even I know that 1+ 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +... sums to an infinitesimal amount less than 2. It's 2-(1/inf), or however you'd say that in Calculus terms.
If someone needs calculus to figure it out, they aren't paying attention. (Also, that problem is totally absurd for a real world baking problem.)
And while I've been a programmer for more than a decade, I've never even used Trig in my job. In fact, I've forgotten how to do it, if I needed to figure out the angles of a triangle, I'd have to look it up.
I think requiring Algebra II is probably reasonable, though. I don't remember exactly what that was, but I'm sure I use it.
As has been pointed out, conservatives and communists have a lot in common.
They're all sure that their ideology could success if we'd just find a real one to elect to office and do it right this time. Those last half a dozen times they picked someone who wasn't a real true conservative or a real true communist? That didn't count, they were liars!
Fuck off, both of you groups. We elect people in this world. I don't care if your ideology works in some imaginary perfect world with an imaginary perfect leader. It's obvious in this world that neither of you can tell a 'real true' anything from a random guy walking down the street, and thus we are forced to assume the next guy, who's saying all the right words now, will do exactly the same thing when put in charge.
Hilariously, I used to say that. and then the current crop of Republicans got elected. And, hey, they are actually fiscally conservative.
Thank God. At least now American will finally notice how actually destructive and insane the policies of fiscal conservatives are.
It's sorta like late 80s USSR...well, they've finally ramped off on the totalitarianism. Communism had 'the right people' in charge for once, or as close as it had ever gotten...and they said, um, since we stopped shooting the people who complain, everyone seems to have started complaining. Maybe we should just stop doing the whole 'communism' thing and see if we can have a working economy for once.
Next election, it will be 'Well, we tried fiscal conservativism, this actually for real, with real actual conservatives. And, strangely, it didn't seem to fix the recession, and now no one has unemployment insurance or WIC. Hrm, perhaps we should elect people actually attempting to solve our problem.'.
I should point out that the NYT Paywall is apparently a much more complex beast than a simple "pay up to see the articles". What they're trying to do is allow search engines, Twitter, and other social media to drive traffic to them, but at the same time not allow people to regularly read their content for free.
Well, yeah, which would require...a cookie. Each person gets a cookie. You can increment it or not increment it based on referer.
If you don't have a cookie, Javascript that redirs you to a page telling you to enable your cookies. (Google, incidentally, explicitly allows this behavior.)
And you make it where a lot of the links don't work without Javascript, to stop people from just disabling Javascript totally. Or even make the page slide into view using Javascript. But you have a sitemap and enough normal links works that Google is okay at finding each article, and you make sure that each page Google indexes really does have that content on it (So as not to annoy them.), even if other people need a cookie to see it.
It's really not rocket science, a single person working eight hours could write one basically as functional as theirs is. Yes, people could get around it if they tried, but, um, they can do that here too.
My guess as to the approximate cost breakdown:
That breakdown is totally insane. The idea that they paid the actual people who did the work a million dollars? Ludicrous. Maybe $100,000.
Um, do you know how much traffic this web site gets? Do you know how many people it took to make it?
You don't 'develop' tools to run websites. About the only company that's needed to do that is Facebook, which the most popular site on the internet, and entirely dynamic. And Google has developed some stuff. But everyone else just uses existing software to run their website on. MySQL and PHP, MSSQL and ASP, Oracle and JSP, open source or commercial, whatever, but they aren't writing that software.
The NYTs doesn't even need a dynamic site with custom tools, they can just regenerate the thing every few minutes. Or, hell, it's not that complicated a site, they can just generate it in real time, although caching would be nice. (They're running Sun-ONE-Web-Server, so I have no idea what scripting they're using, that can run anything.) They just need to pay for enough servers to run the thing, and yes, six people is more than enough for managing the servers.
But $40 million isn't the cost of running the website.(1) It's the cost of the damn development of the paywall. Not even the subscription system, that already existed.
The paywall is a damn cookie that just counts how many time people visit, with some referer exceptions, an exception for logged in people, and tricks to make it hard to delete. That's it. That's all that is. It's something that any idiot could cobble together in a few hours, and a single person could write a pretty good one in a week. (And, as has been pointed out, theirs is only 'pretty good' and has plenty of issues.) It cost them $40 million dollars. It should have cost at most $100,000.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the Republicans keep upping the friction in political discourse.
When they were in power until 2006, they often negotiated together to get enough votes to pass the thing by themselves, and then bring it to the floor and pass it without any Democratic input at all.
That is not how things used to work. Things used to get argued on the floor. People would make agreements with the other party, to vote for their amendment, if some other amendment was included. Instead the Republicans negotiated in secret until they got exactly enough votes to pass. The bill would show up on the floor, Republicans would, in unison, vote down all Democratic amendments, and pass the thing.
When they lost all branches of government in 2008, they then started filibustering everything. Everything. They even managed to pull some Democrats onto the filibuster concept.
That is not how things used to work. If you didn't like a bill, you used to vote against it, not prohibit it from being voted on at all. Filibusters were reserved for extreme outrage, and very short term. But the Republicans decided that 'filibustering' was the new 'voting against'. Hell, even noncontroversial stuff got filibustered...there was one guy whose Senate appointment got held up a year and half...and finally the Senate voted for him, 96 to 3 or something.
Now that Republicans have gained control of the House, they've decided that the budget, which must pass, is the correct place for ideological fights, including flights they already lost, like the ACA.
That is not how things used to work. If you wanted to repeal a law, if you wanted to defund something, you proposed it as an actual law, or at worst an amendment to something unrelated to try to sneak it in. You didn't start adding riders to the actual budget itself.
The Republicans have constantly decided that precedent be damned, civil discourse be damned, they're doing whatever the fuck they want to do that seems to be 'legal'.
If you have a problem with Planned Parenthood, perhaps you should step in and build a nationwide network of clinics in poor areas providing reproductive health services to women who otherwise have no access to them.
No?
Well, perhaps we could have the government do that? It would only cost, oh, several billion dollars to build such places, and of course, cost more to run them because Planned Parenthood had a lot of donors covering costs.
No?
Oh, oh, I know. We could just stop funding them and let women die. I can't see any objection to that. At least not on the part of the Republicans.
And people wonder why poor women vote Democratic.
I think I shall leave you with an analogy for all you feebleminded fools out there:
We are a struggling household. We don't make enough to pay our armed security guard to follow us around, and we're way in debt.
However, fool like you have, herp derp, discovered that we're spending about $430 a month on upkeep of the house next door. You see, the house next door is owned by an absent owner, who gives us $500 a month to maintain the house, plus covers the time we spend ourselves.
We've been using that extra $70 a month to keep from having to take out as many loans to cover the costs of our armed guard, who is more and more insistent he needs new guns and bullets, although we technically are eventually required to spend it on the house next door.
So, herp derp, why are we spending so much on the house next door? Let's just go to that guy, tell him we won't do it anymore, and keep the entire $500 a month for ourselves! WOoooooo!
Social. Security. Is. Not. An. Expense. Cutting it cannot help the budget. Anyone who even slightly pretends it can either a fucking goddamn retard who shouldn't be allowed to vote, or a deliberate liar.
Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars.
Uh, no it's not. The debt is 14 trillion. That is how much we owe.
The deficit is how much we spend each year over revenue. It's currently about $2 trillion, despite the few idiotic cuts the Republicans are pretending is the end of the world if we don't pass.
Interestingly, you're also wrong. 2010 numbers aren't out yet, but 2009's figures say that Defense was 20% of the budget, whereas Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlements except Social Security came to 33%. (Social Security came to an additional 21%.) ALL interest (remember, the government doesn't break out interest by what the loan was for) comes to 8%.
And here is THE LIE. Repeat it enough, and everyone believes it.
Hey, idjit. Those programs are self funded. You can't cut Social Security and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut.
Same with Medicare. Medicare is insurance...people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying fucking Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.
Both those programs take in more money than they spend, or at least, they take in more money on average. (Right now, they're both struggling, but luckily they have money saved up.) Are you suggesting that we should continue to operate the tax collecting part of social security and medicare without actually providing the service? No? Then what the fuck are you suggesting, then, when you claim they're a bigger dent on the budget than the military?
The only part of the budget that can be 'cut' is the part that takes general tax revenue and spends it on things, and the biggest part of that the military, by like 70%. You can't cut things that collect their own money and somehow end up with more money.
dd in multi-year costs of Medicare and Medicaid (like interest on THAT money.)
Christ, you're stupid. Medicare, like Social Security, has collected more money than it spend, so it has a negative impact on interest, because the Federal government uses money from it, at no interest, instead of borrowing from banks.
Medicaid, OTOH, while not self-funded, costs $208 billion a year. Which is probably about ten times the yearly operating costs of the 20 B-2 Bombers. (Which are, of course, a very small amount of the armed forced.) Considering that US is paying $5 trillion in interest a year on $14 trillion, interest on $208 billion would be something like, oh, $70 billion.
And then there's the triple/quad-stores like jena, 4store, virtuoso which allow you to answer questions from your data that you couldn't even begin to imagine doing with SQL.,
Here, we're running into the stupidity of the name NoSQL. What promoters normally mean by that are 'non-relational'.
From what I understand, the databases you just listed are relational. Triplestores just use a simpler query language, and a simpler database layout, allowing for much greater speed.
Our contractor has, however, discovered some irony with MongoDB's "schemaless" claim: unless you can pick an extremely finite set of fields to be indexed, you can't actually do arbitrary queries on arbitrary documents... in other words you need to decide on a schema :-)
Document stores are great for storing documents and indexing metadata and the entire content. They are not great at indexing random parts of it.
I have a feeling if you actually got that indexed, you'd be at the point where the solution would be heavier than just using SQL.
We've been doing a project with MongoDB (no, we're not using it as our authoritative data store, but neither are we using SQL for that), which we could have done with an SQL DB, but honestly we didn't have the resources to do so. We have less than a million records, hardly a huge amount of data - our data is arbitrarily structured, fitting the document-object model perfectly, and makes for absolutely meaningless SQL tables (with many joins, stored procedures so that we could try to service an obscure perlish query language).
See, the thing is, I don't think you know what's going on. No one, at least not me, has a problem with people using a document store to store an insane amount of unstructured documents and trying to pull some sense out of them. That's what they're for.
But there are people out these who have decided to use a document store, because NoSQL is 'better' than SQL, or they're just lazy, so they lump their data together and throw it in one. Or they decide that their user database should be kept in HBase. And then people like me have to deal with the results of that shitpile.
No one here is against non-relational databases, we're against the idiotic 'NoSQL movement' that has randomly sprung up where fools decided to use something besides perfectly functional non-relational databases.
People switch to non-relational databases when what you're trying to do doesn't work well in a relational one, and that's fine. Sadly, we have a lot of people out there with no database knowledge who have decided to switch because NoSQL is 'newer and better' or because they simply don't understand how to make relational databases so throw lumps of data in an object store.
And this is exactly the sort of BULLSHIT I expect from the NoSQL crowd,
You think a) SQL and NoSQL are functionally equivalent, and b) that NoSQL is a 'more modern' version.
Hey, other posters, this sort of mindset is exactly what I was talking about as my actual problem. Exactly, right there. I couldn't put it better myself. This guy thinks NoSQL is the same as SQL, except it works slightly better.
And I'll freely admit my Space Shuttle Crawler analogy was a bit silly. NoSQL is more akin to a tractor trailer. When you need one, you need one...and it's a goddamn stupid car for a person to drive off a dealer lot and attempt to use to as a passenger car.
Actually, you could say that NoSQL attempts to encompass tractor trailers, actual tractors, bulldozers, and the space shuttle crawler, making it not that useful a category to start with, and still resulting in people making rather nonsensical decisions because they watch too many NoSQL commercials on TV.
Looking at it as just SQL vs noSQL is simply ridiculous. The noSQL camp could be anything from simple local key-value stores, to distributed document stores, to graph db's, etc, etc. There is no such thing as 'noSQL' technology, just as there is no 'non-microsoft' technology - there's a whole ecosystem out there of other solutions that can make a lot more sense in particular scenarios.
Dude, it's not the 'anti-NoSQL' guys who decided to look at it this way. As I've repeatedly mentioned, there are plenty of reasons to use non-relational DBs. Everyone used to be perfectly happy.
Then Google ran into the limitations of SQL, and wrote a non-relational databases. And somewhere, somehow, a bunch of people heard of that and decided that they shall call themselves NoSQL and promote themselves as some sort of insane 'rebel alliance' fighting the lame, confusing, and stodgy SQL people, (It has to be cool if Google's using it) and this has resulted utter nonsense as people try to use non-relational databases for things utterly unsuited to it, but instead suited for, duh, relational databases. Or, you know, just files.
The post above this one talks about using a document store for config files. Not in a hypothetical sense, but in an 'this is already happening' sense.
No one here is against non-relational databases. We, or at least I, am against the 'NoSQL movement' which seems to be promoting non-relational databases in utterly absurd places, or at least causing that to happen.
As I tried to explain in my other posts, I have no problem with people using dbm libraries, if people just need to store some random data. Just because NoSQL has retroactively claimed such things under their term doesn't mean they are as useless as the entire movement. If NoSQL was just a new way to refer to those things, I'd have no problem at all.
But I do have a problem when people use HBase or Hypertable, instead of an SQL server, for any non-huge project. This has all the disadvantages of an SQL server, combined with all the disadvantages of a dbm library, and absolutely no advantages that any normal person would be able to take advantages of.
And I do have a problem with document stores, because I suspect that 99% of the time, people are attempting to solve a problem that would be better solved by, you know, the actual document store called 'the file system'. That's where you store damn configuration files. If you want to keep config options in memory, how about, I dunno, making a struct and actually keeping the values in memory?
NoSQL object servers, and NoSQL document servers, are almost always solutions looking for problems. Yes, I know that they were both created for useful real reasons, and I have no problem with using them for that reason. I do have a problem about the strange cult that's arisen around them that attempt to use them for utter nonsense, like using a database to store config files, or using an NoSQL object server to store a forum.
Actually, thinking about it, gdbm, and I assume tokyocabinet, are not technically relational, it's just everyone uses them as such by storing identically shaped records and attaching hash tables to them so people can find things.
What people are complaining about here are things like HBase and Hypertable, not dbm libraries.
They have all the disadvantages of dbm libraries (Like non-records taking up space), and all the disadvantages of SQL servers (Like having to copy things around in memory), and extra disadvantages of neither (like 'eventual' updates, until which you will be inconsistent).
The sole advantages is they can be huge. Really, really huge.
And I'm still not convinced that it wouldn't work better in SQL. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't make relational tables like you have to use NoSQL.
NoSQL seems just an argument in laziness. It seems like a weird mix of caching and unwillingness to design databases correctly.
But I got sick of that argument, so I just with the idea that you need NoSQL for massive amounts of data...
Uh, I know you're trying to push NoSQL, but under no definition of 'toy' is included a billion data points.
In my opinion, it's worthwhile to be familiar with both, and to be able to choose the right one for every task.
Yes, just like taxi drivers should be familiar with passenger cars and the 3000 tonne Space Shuttle Crawler. Because sometimes people need to move the space shuttle.
It's just obvious. Everyone should aim to be skilled in the actual tool everyone uses all the time, and an incredibly specialized tool that is helpful for impossibly large tasks that almost no one actually does.
NoSQL solutions are certainly not the best tool for every job, but neither are normal relational databases.
Oh, I agree. You just try moving the space shuttle with a normal car. Or like your grad project, where you moved an entire building.
I cannot figure out why people just know how to drive a car. Learning how to drive the space shuttle crawler would be so much more useful, and at the very least they should know both.
tokyocabinet and other dbm are not what people are talking about when they say NoSQL. 'NoSQL' does not mean 'database engine that doesn't use SQL'.
NoSQL would be better called 'NoRel'. NoSQL is a non-relational database. And NoSQL is only available as a database server, which I assure you have no less memory requirements than SQL servers. (And if you're having trouble imagining what the hell a 'non-relational database' is, or would be used for, you're not alone.)
Whereas dbm libraries like tokyocabinet are, in fact, relational, they just don't use SQL. (And the server is linked in.) No one has any problem with embedded dbm libraries, SQL or otherwise. They are not NoSQL, they are just not SQL.
Please read up on the NoSQL concept.
There are a few things with SQL that could be done better, and there's still some standardization needed. I'd like to see a SQL 2012 standard or something.
But you're entirely right. There is one place nosql makes sense, and it's gigantic data stores like facebook and google, where the quantity is overwhelming, and the quality isn't that important...it's okay miss a few things, and you're looking for sorta-random stuff. That is why NoSQL was invented.
No one should ever 'choose' to use NoSQL...if you're on the size of a project that needs NoSQL, I promise you you are nowhere near that decision...it will be decided between the seven project architects as they buy thirty servers to run the damn thing. That's the guys who have a legit need, or at least it's a legit option, of using NoSQL.
It's not useful for any other system in existence.
It's especially funny when toy projects try to use NoSQL. It's like idiots trying to run their watches off geothermal power. 'It's free power! FROM THE EARTH!'
Dude, you're using half an amp, perhaps you should learn how to use a watch battery instead of driving 2 mile polls into the ground as you walk around. It's not like SQL is fucking rocket science. In fact, right now, NoSQL is actually more complicated to use.
I read somewhere that the quote by Feyman is actually about the fact that quantum mechanics is impossible to visualize for people who have learned to deal with a macroscopic universe that follows Newton's laws. Unlike relativity, which is easy enough to visualize 'good enough' if you remove a spacial dimension and replace it with time.
Even Feyman couldn't visualize it.
And we should probably consider every single quote Feyman ever made as 'out of context'. ;)
Evolution is a good example of the results of science being inexplicably at that point, and proven later.
Darwin had absolutely no evidence of genes, no idea how they were transferred from parent to child. Mendel was working on that, but failed to actually tell anyone. I'm not talking about DNA, which was much later, I'm talking about basic stuff like 'recessive' and 'dominate' genes.
Darwin didn't know about any of that, he had no way for 'slightly taller giraffes' to have 'slightly taller children'. His theory just predicted the existence of some sort of genetic transfer from parents to child before all that, untouched until being passed on, somehow merging both parents aspects together, and with random minor changes.
Which was, tada, proven correct. DNA does that, with small mutations.
When everyone involved in article is a idiot...and the previous posters don't notice it, giving everyone an fucking page of crap. It's astonishing how no slashdot readers KNOW WHAT SCIENCE IS.
Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?
Those things ARE NOT SCIENCE. Those are the result of science.
This entire article is incoherent nonsense. No one has to 'explain' science....science is trivial to understand. Here it is. Here is the entirety of all of science, stolen from Wikipedia. There are probably better ways to phrase it, but this is good enoug:
1. Use your experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Look for previous explanations. If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.
2. Form a conjecture: When nothing else is yet known, try to state an explanation, to someone else, or to your notebook.
3. Deduce a prediction from that explanation: If you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?
4. Test: Look for the opposite of each consequence in order to disprove 2.
That. Is. Fucking. Science. That's it. It can be explained and demonstrated in a day to anyone.
Oh, before anyone starts using your results, you have to tell other people what you do, so they learn what you have learned, and can repeat what you did. That is not, strictly speaking, 'science', but it's expected to produce output that way instead of just announcing it.
There is no quantum physics in it, there is no string theory, there is no Schroedingerâ(TM)s equation. Those things are what people have come up with using science. Those are the result of science, they are no more science than you are driving around in a Ford manufacturing plant or eating a kitchen.
As for the output of science? We don't accept it on faith, we accept it because it seems to work. Saying it's 'accepted on faith' is like saying we 'buy cars on faith in internal combustion'. Uh, not really.
Please note that it's the Republicans in this case. It'll be the Democrats next time.
No it won't. This attack is exactly the sort of 'welfare queen' attack the Republicans have been doing forever.
The Democrats, meanwhile, just last year passed a bill making it illegal for insurance companies to discriminate based on the existing health of a person, including their weight.
I know the right claims the Democrats will do something like this, but people should realize that is what psychologists call 'projection'. Restricting government services so 'undesirable' people can't use them is almost solely a Republican habit, especially when those services are aimed at the poor.
In the rare cases that Democrats go after undesirable behavior, like smoking, they just go after the behavior, making it harder to do. Whether or not they should be going after smoking is a separate issue, but they actually ban it in certain areas and whatnot. For the poor and the rich.
Whereas Republicans always step in with a 'tax', so it's only poor people who can't afford that bad behavior. Because, in the end, it's not the smokers, or the obese, or drug dealers(1), or whatever that are the 'undesirables'...it's those damn poor people.
1) Remember the whole 'deny student loans to people with drug convictions'? Aka, 'deny college to poor people with drug convictions, but not rich people with drug convictions'?
Same here. If that's what Bush was, I'm almost exactly the same size as him, normally about 10 pounds heavier, although I can break sub-200 if I lay off the Mountain Dew for a few days. I actually am in bad shape, because I have a congenital heart condition and can't exert myself more than short periods of time.
But with regard to weight, I could maybe ditch 20 pounds in some ideal world. I can, right now, feel my ribs....I can't magically get a smaller torso!
People need to realize that 'overweight' and 'obese' aren't the same thing, and that the NIH's measurement of that is exceptionally silly.
And also that a lot of people are overweight for reasons outside their control, not just thyroid. (A thyroid problem is probably the only reason for actual obesity, though.) I probably have a few added pounds because I am 'lazy' and the only exercise I get is walking...but that's because if I do anything that gets my heart-rate up, it, um, doesn't work right and I overheat, get nauseated, and almost pass out.
However, we don't need to sit here and argue like this is a serious law that could be passed elsewhere. This is the Republicans, once again, attacking poor people. That's pretty much it.
Well, you're assuming it took a year, and that people actually got paid reasonable amounts.
I was assuming closer to two months, and also that people were being paid jack shit.
It's not really important.
Uh, no.
Just like 99.9999% of programmers out there, who work on server processes or web site backends or business applications or commercial development haven't.
No one, I mean no one, builds fucking physics simulations. There are like ten of those in all of existence at various video game companies, and that's it. Maybe 200 programmers work on the physics part of those in the entire world. That's it.
That's always the go-to response for 'Calculus is pointless for CS majors', but it's utter nonsense.
By your logic, programmers need a car on auto repair, because I promise you that more programmers, worldwide, are working on the embedded computers inside cars than on physics simulators.
The assumption that correlation and causation are interchangeable is so rampant in modern society that in any given story it is probably that someone has made that error.
Just because the assumption is rampant, and everyone gets it wrong, does not mean everyone is getting it wrong because the assumption is rampant.
Perhaps assuming they are the same thing when reading is indicative of people generally being idiots who can't reason their way out of a wet paper bag, whereas writing it wrong is simple because the person's audience is an idiot and they want to write sensational news pieces.
correlation != causation ;)
Seriously, though, you're right. I read 'Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success' and said 'that's one of the stupidest thing I've ever read'.
In my school, at least, whether or not you took Algebra II or not was the most obvious indicator if you were in the college prep track or the vocational track. Making all the vocational students take Algebra II wouldn't change anything.
Dude, I've never passed Calculus, and even I know that 1+ 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... sums to an infinitesimal amount less than 2. It's 2-(1/inf), or however you'd say that in Calculus terms.
If someone needs calculus to figure it out, they aren't paying attention. (Also, that problem is totally absurd for a real world baking problem.)
And while I've been a programmer for more than a decade, I've never even used Trig in my job. In fact, I've forgotten how to do it, if I needed to figure out the angles of a triangle, I'd have to look it up.
I think requiring Algebra II is probably reasonable, though. I don't remember exactly what that was, but I'm sure I use it.
As has been pointed out, conservatives and communists have a lot in common.
They're all sure that their ideology could success if we'd just find a real one to elect to office and do it right this time. Those last half a dozen times they picked someone who wasn't a real true conservative or a real true communist? That didn't count, they were liars!
Fuck off, both of you groups. We elect people in this world. I don't care if your ideology works in some imaginary perfect world with an imaginary perfect leader. It's obvious in this world that neither of you can tell a 'real true' anything from a random guy walking down the street, and thus we are forced to assume the next guy, who's saying all the right words now, will do exactly the same thing when put in charge.
Hilariously, I used to say that. and then the current crop of Republicans got elected. And, hey, they are actually fiscally conservative.
Thank God. At least now American will finally notice how actually destructive and insane the policies of fiscal conservatives are.
It's sorta like late 80s USSR...well, they've finally ramped off on the totalitarianism. Communism had 'the right people' in charge for once, or as close as it had ever gotten...and they said, um, since we stopped shooting the people who complain, everyone seems to have started complaining. Maybe we should just stop doing the whole 'communism' thing and see if we can have a working economy for once.
Next election, it will be 'Well, we tried fiscal conservativism, this actually for real, with real actual conservatives. And, strangely, it didn't seem to fix the recession, and now no one has unemployment insurance or WIC. Hrm, perhaps we should elect people actually attempting to solve our problem.'.
I should point out that the NYT Paywall is apparently a much more complex beast than a simple "pay up to see the articles". What they're trying to do is allow search engines, Twitter, and other social media to drive traffic to them, but at the same time not allow people to regularly read their content for free.
Well, yeah, which would require...a cookie. Each person gets a cookie. You can increment it or not increment it based on referer.
If you don't have a cookie, Javascript that redirs you to a page telling you to enable your cookies. (Google, incidentally, explicitly allows this behavior.)
And you make it where a lot of the links don't work without Javascript, to stop people from just disabling Javascript totally. Or even make the page slide into view using Javascript. But you have a sitemap and enough normal links works that Google is okay at finding each article, and you make sure that each page Google indexes really does have that content on it (So as not to annoy them.), even if other people need a cookie to see it.
It's really not rocket science, a single person working eight hours could write one basically as functional as theirs is. Yes, people could get around it if they tried, but, um, they can do that here too.
My guess as to the approximate cost breakdown:
That breakdown is totally insane. The idea that they paid the actual people who did the work a million dollars? Ludicrous. Maybe $100,000.
Um, do you know how much traffic this web site gets? Do you know how many people it took to make it?
You don't 'develop' tools to run websites. About the only company that's needed to do that is Facebook, which the most popular site on the internet, and entirely dynamic. And Google has developed some stuff. But everyone else just uses existing software to run their website on. MySQL and PHP, MSSQL and ASP, Oracle and JSP, open source or commercial, whatever, but they aren't writing that software.
The NYTs doesn't even need a dynamic site with custom tools, they can just regenerate the thing every few minutes. Or, hell, it's not that complicated a site, they can just generate it in real time, although caching would be nice. (They're running Sun-ONE-Web-Server, so I have no idea what scripting they're using, that can run anything.) They just need to pay for enough servers to run the thing, and yes, six people is more than enough for managing the servers.
But $40 million isn't the cost of running the website.(1) It's the cost of the damn development of the paywall. Not even the subscription system, that already existed.
The paywall is a damn cookie that just counts how many time people visit, with some referer exceptions, an exception for logged in people, and tricks to make it hard to delete. That's it. That's all that is. It's something that any idiot could cobble together in a few hours, and a single person could write a pretty good one in a week. (And, as has been pointed out, theirs is only 'pretty good' and has plenty of issues.) It cost them $40 million dollars. It should have cost at most $100,000.
1) Although that would be even more insane.