Yes, I can, but I won't say the name, because I've personally worked on a NoSQL system for medical data. In our case, we explicitly chose to drop ACID support, because we needed the faster and cheaper write speed, which outpaced RDBMS alternatives tenfold on the same hardware. Since we were building statistics, any occasional loss of records was not in any way a liability. Later on in the project, ACID support was enabled, once we had completed our initial load and the write rate had dropped from a few billion records per day to only a few million. Tests showed that we still outpaced the fastest RDBMS alternative by more than 200%.
What's interesting with MarkLogic is that I can't seem to find any clarification on which parts of the site it was used for. There's no indication whether it was even used for critical data, though apparently it does elsewhere. Of course, I suspect that won't matter. You're pretty obviously a die-hard RDBMS-lover, and we mustn't let facts get in the way of a good outrage.
Quite the contrary: It was always a new project, with a new challenge and always something to learn, with no worries about hard deadlines or dealing with customers... and it's always fun to see the look on someone's face when they say it'll take six months for a minor change and you tell them that you already have it working.
As I read it, that clause impacts the Tesla stores, not the online sales.
Basically, the person getting a dealer license (used for test drives) can't be affiliated with the manufacturer. They have to be independent, like most other dealers.
When you lack the wherewithal in your own organization to make the project you're planning, you also lack the wherewithal to judge how much time/money/manpower it would take someone else.
I've worked on a project where we had a small team of engineers devoted to doing things our subcontractors were being paid to do. They wouldn't need to make production-ready components, but just enough proof-of-concept work to validate the subcontractors' estimates, and catch their occasional lies.
After a project that I was biased against [1] failed, my bias was confirmed and I knew that my preferred solution would be much better.
I have a half-baked plan already, so surely the real thing can't be much more difficult.
Now I see evidence that contradicts my bias, so I'm completely surprised.
[1]: Why is a project I know little about using a database I know little about?
One of MarkLogic's strong points is that it uses that "example schema from a private insurance firm" as its starting point, keeping records arranged in the proper hierarchies for use in the healthcare industry. Yes, you could reproduce the constraints using another database, but why go to the extra work? Oh, right, there's that consistency point... but a quick search shows that MarkLogic is claiming ACID support.
So for a project in the healthcare sector is using a healthcare-oriented database. This doesn't seem to be a bad idea. The questionable part is how there are fewer MarkLogic experts than Oracle gurus, but that's not really a showstopper.
The point remains that it isn't the will of the magma pit to kill people. Somebody intentionally put it in a place where it would cause harm. Perhaps you did it of your own volition, and it's you who is killing people. Perhaps I'm the idiot and I hired you to put a magma pit under my door mat.
Somebody makes the decision to put an overpowered car into a situation where it can kill people. That person should be held responsible. I'm not qualified to judge whether it's the manufacturer, the salesman, or the driver, but it's (probably) not the car.
That's the point of the research. The usual model assumes low mortality. These researchers created a model that works for epidemics with high mortality.
The mathematical model that describes conventional epidemics is known as the susceptible- infected-recovered model. Individuals start off being uninfected but susceptible. When they come into contact with the disease, they become infected. And when they recover, they return to the general population but are no longer susceptible.
Back in 2009, researchers used this approach to build a simple model of zombie apocalypses. It suggests that zombies, once cured, return to the population to live out the rest of their years. And although no longer infectious, they are still zombies.
So a proper mathematical model of zombie epidemics has to allow for [zombie destruction]. Indeed, death is a potential outcome in many diseases so this kind of model better represents what goes in in the real world too.
In other words, most epidemic models assume a high chance of recovery and a low chance of reinfection. In some cases, fortunately rare in the real world, these assumptions don't hold true. The researchers therefore worked out a model that allows the infected to die permanently, then validated their methods using Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations based off of information pulled from zombie movies.
The old model would accurately describe a flu outbreak, where a single strain of influenza runs through the population, but pretty much everyone survives and is then immune to reinfection. A worst-case epidemic, where a rapidly-mutating strain repeatedly infects the population with a high mortality rate, is better suited to this new model.
That's what started this whole "corporate personhood" thing, though. Corporations needed a legal status to allow them to enter contracts, and just as importantly, allow them to decline contracts... but that means that a corporation can now have choices, and those choices have an impact on the rest of the world, meaning they have political influence, as well, but the corporate stakeholders already have their regular vote in government, so now they get two ways to influence government, compared to the single vote everybody's supposed to have. Some folks understandably think this is unfair.
Underlying the debate is the question of whether it's possible for an entity to have a free choice without having the freedom to affect politics. Relatedly, should corporations even be allowed to have choices, or should they be required to follow strict nonpartisan rules to govern their behavior, and who gets to decide those rules?
With regard to humans, the similar question is indeed what point an adolescent understands the world and its interactions enough to responsibly and conscientiously enter a contract... and who gets to decide when that happens?
As soon as animals can be reasonably expected to understand a contract and uphold their side of it, I'll care about whether they have the legal grounds to enter into them.
Having worked in a decent recording studio, absolutely not.
A good studio has little echo, but still some. A missing echo makes instruments sound like they're synthesized; especially percussion and hammered strings. When people hear a drum beat, the first thing they get is the loud thump as expected, but that's mixed with an echo a few milliseconds later as that thump bounces off the walls and ceiling of the studio. While humans can't really perceive the echo as a second drumbeat (because they'll also be hearing the drum head still vibrating from the initial hit), the extra echoes add complexity to the wave, making the drum sound more vibrant.
Without echoes, everything sounds dead, much like a digital sample that's been compressed too heavily at too low a bitrate. Sure, there's a drum, but it's not quite as good as a real drum. There's a singer, but they sound like they're talking more than singing. About the only instrument that sounds right is the electric keyboard, but that's not much of a song. This is actually one of the reasons that recordings made outside sound different. There are no nice walls to brighten up the mix. A good recording engineer can then add echo while preserving the wind and ambiance, so the final copy still sounds like an outdoor recording, but the band sounds natural.
The ones who suddenly lose the majority of other sensory inputs they've gotten accustomed to, yes.
It's not "lack of sound" that causes hallucinations. It's the unusual circumstances that your brain isn't able to understand as easily as the normal world.
Even withdrawing an amount in cash is restricted in most countries.
Mostly for practical reasons. Banks don't like keeping enough cash on hand all the time for customers to make large withdrawals, so they put a reasonable limit on what each customer can withdraw in a day. You can usually get more with advance notice.
This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of
20 September 2013, which was received by this office on 20 September 2013,
for "copies of contracts containing any of the following keywords or phrases:
"CNO", "CAN", "CND", "CNE", "computer network exploitation," "computer
network defense," "computer network attack," "computer network operations",
"exploits" and/or "implants," and related services over the past 5 years. If
retrieving the contracts themselves is too burdensome, please provide a list of
contracts."
From that, it appears the FOIA request was actually asking for any contract including the word "can", amongst other things. It's probably a shorter list to find contracts that don't fall into this request.
The response continues:
As we have advised in your previous FOIA requests regarding contract
data, acquisition contract files could be more reasonably searched if a contract
number, company name with address, and service award date were provided.
However, there are many instances when contract information is not
retrievable by company name alone; some companies may have several
locations, or there may be a number variations of the same name based on a
name or keyword.
Or, in other words, if you have a particular contract or contractor, they can pull that easily. I'll infer from that that they have a big table of contracts with contractor name/address, date, and number, and those contracts can then be pulled by number from their probably-digital storage, but running a full-text search on all of their contracts for 5 years is not what the database is set up to do.
I have been audited. The competent investigators at the IRS were quite helpful in explaining why they couldn't accept the paperwork I had submitted, and what other paperwork would be needed. When I couldn't get that other paperwork, they were able to guide me through the proper channels to document that the other documentation was unavailable, which was all they ultimately needed.
I guess they keep the underpaid monkeys for people who hold grudges.
And clearly they dont understand the concept of regular expressions, or of parsing data files.
Neither of those really works on a scanned PDF of a quick design sketch someone made, or the photos of the defective materials encountered, or the 3D models of the parts for the engineers.
catalog their data and store some metadata to help them process additional FOIA requests
That gets in the way of the real work, though, and isn't actually required by the FOIA, so actually dedicating funding to such things is unlikely to happen.
...it's as if the NSA still thinks the american public are...
The situations are in no way even close to comparable.
Your strawman's falling down.
It's appears much more that the FOIA request was asking for a broad swath of information across several programs that don't have a common database. It's not just a matter of parsing the files, but even knowing what to look for.
For years I've been a fan of matte displays, preferring to have my displays still usable when there are other lights around, but I guess glossy displays have now reached their extreme.
it doesn't matter whether a loaf of bread costs $1 or $100, as long as people can get a loaf of bread when they want it without too much hassle
If there's a couple thousand people wanting one loaf of bread, most of them will not get what they want, regardless of the price.
Let's try again with a different phrasing: As long as people get what they want without too much hassle, all numeric monetary values are effectively meaningless, but people still have emotional attachments to the numbers they're used to thinking about.
Yes... that's kind of the point. I described a bog-standard forward contract, the simplest kind of short. Despite the lack of exchanges, there is no reason a regular old contract cannot be made, but like I said, it's more difficult to find someone to take your wager.
What I want to hide depends entirely on who's looking for it.
The government already knows my real name, and knows I use "Sarten-X" as an alias, too. The government also already knows my address, and if agents want to come visit, they're welcome to.
On the other hand, I don't trust the Internet fuckwads nearly so much, so "Sarten-X" is all you get.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I can, but I won't say the name, because I've personally worked on a NoSQL system for medical data. In our case, we explicitly chose to drop ACID support, because we needed the faster and cheaper write speed, which outpaced RDBMS alternatives tenfold on the same hardware. Since we were building statistics, any occasional loss of records was not in any way a liability. Later on in the project, ACID support was enabled, once we had completed our initial load and the write rate had dropped from a few billion records per day to only a few million. Tests showed that we still outpaced the fastest RDBMS alternative by more than 200%.
What's interesting with MarkLogic is that I can't seem to find any clarification on which parts of the site it was used for. There's no indication whether it was even used for critical data, though apparently it does elsewhere. Of course, I suspect that won't matter. You're pretty obviously a die-hard RDBMS-lover, and we mustn't let facts get in the way of a good outrage.
Quite the contrary: It was always a new project, with a new challenge and always something to learn, with no worries about hard deadlines or dealing with customers... and it's always fun to see the look on someone's face when they say it'll take six months for a minor change and you tell them that you already have it working.
As I read it, that clause impacts the Tesla stores, not the online sales.
Basically, the person getting a dealer license (used for test drives) can't be affiliated with the manufacturer. They have to be independent, like most other dealers.
When you lack the wherewithal in your own organization to make the project you're planning, you also lack the wherewithal to judge how much time/money/manpower it would take someone else.
I've worked on a project where we had a small team of engineers devoted to doing things our subcontractors were being paid to do. They wouldn't need to make production-ready components, but just enough proof-of-concept work to validate the subcontractors' estimates, and catch their occasional lies.
Allow me to rephrase:
After a project that I was biased against [1] failed, my bias was confirmed and I knew that my preferred solution would be much better.
I have a half-baked plan already, so surely the real thing can't be much more difficult.
Now I see evidence that contradicts my bias, so I'm completely surprised.
[1]: Why is a project I know little about using a database I know little about?
One of MarkLogic's strong points is that it uses that "example schema from a private insurance firm" as its starting point, keeping records arranged in the proper hierarchies for use in the healthcare industry. Yes, you could reproduce the constraints using another database, but why go to the extra work? Oh, right, there's that consistency point... but a quick search shows that MarkLogic is claiming ACID support.
So for a project in the healthcare sector is using a healthcare-oriented database. This doesn't seem to be a bad idea. The questionable part is how there are fewer MarkLogic experts than Oracle gurus, but that's not really a showstopper.
The point remains that it isn't the will of the magma pit to kill people. Somebody intentionally put it in a place where it would cause harm. Perhaps you did it of your own volition, and it's you who is killing people. Perhaps I'm the idiot and I hired you to put a magma pit under my door mat.
Somebody makes the decision to put an overpowered car into a situation where it can kill people. That person should be held responsible. I'm not qualified to judge whether it's the manufacturer, the salesman, or the driver, but it's (probably) not the car.
Cars don't kill people. Stupid people driving cars kill people.
That's the point of the research. The usual model assumes low mortality. These researchers created a model that works for epidemics with high mortality.
The summary is crap.
The mathematical model that describes conventional epidemics is known as the susceptible- infected-recovered model. Individuals start off being uninfected but susceptible. When they come into contact with the disease, they become infected. And when they recover, they return to the general population but are no longer susceptible.
Back in 2009, researchers used this approach to build a simple model of zombie apocalypses. It suggests that zombies, once cured, return to the population to live out the rest of their years. And although no longer infectious, they are still zombies.
So a proper mathematical model of zombie epidemics has to allow for [zombie destruction]. Indeed, death is a potential outcome in many diseases so this kind of model better represents what goes in in the real world too.
In other words, most epidemic models assume a high chance of recovery and a low chance of reinfection. In some cases, fortunately rare in the real world, these assumptions don't hold true. The researchers therefore worked out a model that allows the infected to die permanently, then validated their methods using Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations based off of information pulled from zombie movies.
The old model would accurately describe a flu outbreak, where a single strain of influenza runs through the population, but pretty much everyone survives and is then immune to reinfection. A worst-case epidemic, where a rapidly-mutating strain repeatedly infects the population with a high mortality rate, is better suited to this new model.
Seems rather silly, doesn't it?
That's what started this whole "corporate personhood" thing, though. Corporations needed a legal status to allow them to enter contracts, and just as importantly, allow them to decline contracts... but that means that a corporation can now have choices, and those choices have an impact on the rest of the world, meaning they have political influence, as well, but the corporate stakeholders already have their regular vote in government, so now they get two ways to influence government, compared to the single vote everybody's supposed to have. Some folks understandably think this is unfair.
Underlying the debate is the question of whether it's possible for an entity to have a free choice without having the freedom to affect politics. Relatedly, should corporations even be allowed to have choices, or should they be required to follow strict nonpartisan rules to govern their behavior, and who gets to decide those rules?
With regard to humans, the similar question is indeed what point an adolescent understands the world and its interactions enough to responsibly and conscientiously enter a contract... and who gets to decide when that happens?
As soon as animals can be reasonably expected to understand a contract and uphold their side of it, I'll care about whether they have the legal grounds to enter into them.
+1, Inadvertently Brilliant
The normal and civil thing is to pick up after your dog, rather than fouling communal space.
Having worked in a decent recording studio, absolutely not.
A good studio has little echo, but still some. A missing echo makes instruments sound like they're synthesized; especially percussion and hammered strings. When people hear a drum beat, the first thing they get is the loud thump as expected, but that's mixed with an echo a few milliseconds later as that thump bounces off the walls and ceiling of the studio. While humans can't really perceive the echo as a second drumbeat (because they'll also be hearing the drum head still vibrating from the initial hit), the extra echoes add complexity to the wave, making the drum sound more vibrant.
Without echoes, everything sounds dead, much like a digital sample that's been compressed too heavily at too low a bitrate. Sure, there's a drum, but it's not quite as good as a real drum. There's a singer, but they sound like they're talking more than singing. About the only instrument that sounds right is the electric keyboard, but that's not much of a song. This is actually one of the reasons that recordings made outside sound different. There are no nice walls to brighten up the mix. A good recording engineer can then add echo while preserving the wind and ambiance, so the final copy still sounds like an outdoor recording, but the band sounds natural.
The ones who suddenly lose the majority of other sensory inputs they've gotten accustomed to, yes.
It's not "lack of sound" that causes hallucinations. It's the unusual circumstances that your brain isn't able to understand as easily as the normal world.
Even withdrawing an amount in cash is restricted in most countries.
Mostly for practical reasons. Banks don't like keeping enough cash on hand all the time for customers to make large withdrawals, so they put a reasonable limit on what each customer can withdraw in a day. You can usually get more with advance notice.
Billy Maize is the Pitcher in the Rye.
...Slashdot needs a comment filter for bad pun density.
It's worse than that. The actual response begins:
This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of 20 September 2013, which was received by this office on 20 September 2013, for "copies of contracts containing any of the following keywords or phrases: "CNO", "CAN", "CND", "CNE", "computer network exploitation," "computer network defense," "computer network attack," "computer network operations", "exploits" and/or "implants," and related services over the past 5 years. If retrieving the contracts themselves is too burdensome, please provide a list of contracts."
From that, it appears the FOIA request was actually asking for any contract including the word "can", amongst other things. It's probably a shorter list to find contracts that don't fall into this request.
The response continues:
As we have advised in your previous FOIA requests regarding contract data, acquisition contract files could be more reasonably searched if a contract number, company name with address, and service award date were provided. However, there are many instances when contract information is not retrievable by company name alone; some companies may have several locations, or there may be a number variations of the same name based on a name or keyword.
Or, in other words, if you have a particular contract or contractor, they can pull that easily. I'll infer from that that they have a big table of contracts with contractor name/address, date, and number, and those contracts can then be pulled by number from their probably-digital storage, but running a full-text search on all of their contracts for 5 years is not what the database is set up to do.
I have been audited. The competent investigators at the IRS were quite helpful in explaining why they couldn't accept the paperwork I had submitted, and what other paperwork would be needed. When I couldn't get that other paperwork, they were able to guide me through the proper channels to document that the other documentation was unavailable, which was all they ultimately needed.
I guess they keep the underpaid monkeys for people who hold grudges.
And clearly they dont understand the concept of regular expressions, or of parsing data files.
Neither of those really works on a scanned PDF of a quick design sketch someone made, or the photos of the defective materials encountered, or the 3D models of the parts for the engineers.
catalog their data and store some metadata to help them process additional FOIA requests
That gets in the way of the real work, though, and isn't actually required by the FOIA, so actually dedicating funding to such things is unlikely to happen.
...it's as if the NSA still thinks the american public are...
The situations are in no way even close to comparable.
Your strawman's falling down.
It's appears much more that the FOIA request was asking for a broad swath of information across several programs that don't have a common database. It's not just a matter of parsing the files, but even knowing what to look for.
For years I've been a fan of matte displays, preferring to have my displays still usable when there are other lights around, but I guess glossy displays have now reached their extreme.
I bet the glare's awful.
...and I don't consider that something to hide.
it doesn't matter whether a loaf of bread costs $1 or $100, as long as people can get a loaf of bread when they want it without too much hassle
If there's a couple thousand people wanting one loaf of bread, most of them will not get what they want, regardless of the price.
Let's try again with a different phrasing: As long as people get what they want without too much hassle, all numeric monetary values are effectively meaningless, but people still have emotional attachments to the numbers they're used to thinking about.
Yes... that's kind of the point. I described a bog-standard forward contract, the simplest kind of short. Despite the lack of exchanges, there is no reason a regular old contract cannot be made, but like I said, it's more difficult to find someone to take your wager.
What I want to hide depends entirely on who's looking for it.
The government already knows my real name, and knows I use "Sarten-X" as an alias, too. The government also already knows my address, and if agents want to come visit, they're welcome to.
On the other hand, I don't trust the Internet fuckwads nearly so much, so "Sarten-X" is all you get.