You will, of course, be demanding accountability in military spending that's equal to what scientist using public funds have now, right? How about starting with the total decommissioning of our nuclear weapons? We spend about 8 billion dollars on each nuclear submarine. Has anyone been asked to present a post-Cold War case for ever having one of those?
If you've experienced Oracle's "24/7/365 top-notch support," as you phrase it, you know there are certain problems it will not help you with. For example, there are known bugs, some of which cause what in Oracle jargon are called "600 errors," which means, "you're screwed, and you've lost data irretrievably." These bugs have remained unfixed for years, and no matter what kind of support you buy from Oracle, they will not fix them. Their green-eyeshade people have decreed that the cost of fixing them is not worth it.
Better pro tip: always use your SQL engine's parameterization rather than rely on "sanitizing" such inputs. Your engine's parameterizer is extremely well tested, even if it's an engine with relatively sloppy coding practices. Your "sanitizing" script can never be tested quite as well.
If somebody were willing to come up with a billion dollars in cash, they could buy the top 100 people in the PostgreSQL project, and that would cramp it severely for a couple of years.
That said, Monty took VC money, which is basically legalized loan sharking. Taking VC money results, in the overwhelming majority of cases, in the complete screwing of the borrower. Monty was one of the lucky few who managed to get a fortune out of that situation, which makes his whining utterly unseemly.
"Octopodes" would be the correct plural if octopus were an ancient Greek word, but since it's not, octopuses is it. "Octopi" just makes you look both pretentious and ignorant at once, a feat which may cause people to think you're a libertarian. Avoid this fate.
Cheap, clean energy with no dependence on hateful towel-heads - what's not to like?
I'm all for cheap energy, but the second law of thermodynamics means that any energy you've got is spilling heat pollution, and the advocates re not claiming that heat is the only thing to deal with.
As for those "towel-heads," a word which should get you about the same reaction as "nigger" or "faggot:" a punch in the face, you might want to look into just exactly what actions we've taken and policies we've got in place that we could reasonably expect have made them, "hateful." One of the most repressive regimes on earth, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is an entirely Western creation. It's there because they're more convenient to get petroleum from with an unaccountable autocracy doing the deals.
After reading this article, it sure puts things into perspective about how I was raised. It seems that Eric Spiegel and I have very different perspectives and work ethic. If you do a good job, you will be rewarded.
You clearly need to get out in the world a little more. What happens when, not if, your boss doesn't see things quite your way? What happens when your hard work feels threatening to your co-workers, who may not work quite so hard, and leads them to do all kinds of stuff to undermine you. You're not working in splendid isolation with some fairy-tale objective criteria, assessed by equally mythical perfectly fair assessors, for success. You're in reality land, and while working hard is one thing to do--sometimes it's not even a good thing--it's far from the only one.
One example of "working hard" that's not good to do is when you, through your diligence, pile more technical debt onto a project that's already got unsustainably much of it. Another is working hard to accomplish something that's illegal and/or unethical.
> If non-organic food is bad because pesticides are, surely farmers who handle lots of it ought to be dropping dead?
The people actually handling the stuff are, in fact, dropping dead. The problem is that a lot of them don't have their papers, so their deaths get ignored, or at worst, celebrated by the racist right.
Acquiring a fortune isn't the same thing as actually accomplishing something. Frequently, it's a matter of being at the right place at the right time. Come to think of it, I know of no fortune that would be possible without that essential bit of luck.
Please to recall that the Manhattan Project was originally intended to be used in Europe, and that would have, sooner or later, ended the war. Nothing you've put out here makes me think the Axis might have won in the absence of the crypto stuff.
Outside of science fiction novels, where did it do that? If you're thinking of WWII, the Allies had a gigantically larger industrial base than the Axis could ever summon, and basically won by throwing enough men and materiel at the problem. At most, crypto might have shortened that war, but even that's not crystal clear.
Let's say, motorized personal transport. I'd be down with making it just as hard to get and then keep a driver's license as a pilot's license, which would have this effect. Other side effects would include depopulating those soul-killing suburbs and exurbs, bumping up civic life, making it possible for us to go carbon-negative instead of just carbon-neutral, and last, but not least, listening to all the whiny libertarepublicans moan helplessly.
A lot of people work at the minimum wage or effectively less than that--think wait staff at restaurants. $750 may be "measly" to you, but to somebody who just barely makes rent and food on a low income, it's an amount of money they may never have had all at once.
The difference in needed infrastructure between power and internet is approximately the difference in energy provided. Internet access can be provided for days or weeks off a relatively small battery pack, assuming that the sun doesn't shine over that time. Years otherwise. Electric power for that time requires large energy stores and generation capacity.
and when you don't, don't. Simple, really. If you're raking in the bucks, you need to take more buck-related responsibility. Under a regime like this, proprietary software goes to the teensy niche where it belongs.
What I'm more concerned with is the amount of contributions to PostgreSQL.
This is the beauty of being an open source project like PostgreSQL instead of an open source product like MySQL. The former means that companies can join and leave the effort, as has happened several times so far and will again for PostgreSQL. The latter means the project's health is tightly tied to the vagaries of that one company.
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You will, of course, be demanding accountability in military spending that's equal to what scientist using public funds have now, right? How about starting with the total decommissioning of our nuclear weapons? We spend about 8 billion dollars on each nuclear submarine. Has anyone been asked to present a post-Cold War case for ever having one of those?
When you frame something as "demonizing," you're implying that the characterization of demonic behavior is not accurate.
Given the actual track record of corporations since the beginning of the East India Company, your implication is false on its face.
If you've experienced Oracle's "24/7/365 top-notch support," as you phrase it, you know there are certain problems it will not help you with. For example, there are known bugs, some of which cause what in Oracle jargon are called "600 errors," which means, "you're screwed, and you've lost data irretrievably." These bugs have remained unfixed for years, and no matter what kind of support you buy from Oracle, they will not fix them. Their green-eyeshade people have decreed that the cost of fixing them is not worth it.
Better pro tip: always use your SQL engine's parameterization rather than rely on "sanitizing" such inputs. Your engine's parameterizer is extremely well tested, even if it's an engine with relatively sloppy coding practices. Your "sanitizing" script can never be tested quite as well.
It's not just the "War on Terror." It's all the wars. We face no external threats, militarily speaking. It's time for us to discard our empire.
...for stalkers.
Time to ban!
If somebody were willing to come up with a billion dollars in cash, they could buy the top 100 people in the PostgreSQL project, and that would cramp it severely for a couple of years.
That said, Monty took VC money, which is basically legalized loan sharking. Taking VC money results, in the overwhelming majority of cases, in the complete screwing of the borrower. Monty was one of the lucky few who managed to get a fortune out of that situation, which makes his whining utterly unseemly.
"Octopodes" would be the correct plural if octopus were an ancient Greek word, but since it's not, octopuses is it. "Octopi" just makes you look both pretentious and ignorant at once, a feat which may cause people to think you're a libertarian. Avoid this fate.
I'm all for cheap energy, but the second law of thermodynamics means that any energy you've got is spilling heat pollution, and the advocates re not claiming that heat is the only thing to deal with.
As for those "towel-heads," a word which should get you about the same reaction as "nigger" or "faggot:" a punch in the face, you might want to look into just exactly what actions we've taken and policies we've got in place that we could reasonably expect have made them, "hateful." One of the most repressive regimes on earth, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is an entirely Western creation. It's there because they're more convenient to get petroleum from with an unaccountable autocracy doing the deals.
We are not innocent victims in this mess.
You clearly need to get out in the world a little more. What happens when, not if, your boss doesn't see things quite your way? What happens when your hard work feels threatening to your co-workers, who may not work quite so hard, and leads them to do all kinds of stuff to undermine you. You're not working in splendid isolation with some fairy-tale objective criteria, assessed by equally mythical perfectly fair assessors, for success. You're in reality land, and while working hard is one thing to do--sometimes it's not even a good thing--it's far from the only one.
One example of "working hard" that's not good to do is when you, through your diligence, pile more technical debt onto a project that's already got unsustainably much of it. Another is working hard to accomplish something that's illegal and/or unethical.
> If non-organic food is bad because pesticides are, surely farmers who handle lots of it ought to be dropping dead?
The people actually handling the stuff are, in fact, dropping dead. The problem is that a lot of them don't have their papers, so their deaths get ignored, or at worst, celebrated by the racist right.
Because better products don't increase profits per se. Getting paid more than you spend increases your profits.
I'll worry about the Berne Convention when they start enforcing everything in the Geneva Convention, all they way to the top.
Acquiring a fortune isn't the same thing as actually accomplishing something. Frequently, it's a matter of being at the right place at the right time. Come to think of it, I know of no fortune that would be possible without that essential bit of luck.
Please to recall that the Manhattan Project was originally intended to be used in Europe, and that would have, sooner or later, ended the war. Nothing you've put out here makes me think the Axis might have won in the absence of the crypto stuff.
Outside of science fiction novels, where did it do that? If you're thinking of WWII, the Allies had a gigantically larger industrial base than the Axis could ever summon, and basically won by throwing enough men and materiel at the problem. At most, crypto might have shortened that war, but even that's not crystal clear.
It turns out that you can turn CO2 into fuel by exposing it to a titanium oxide catalyst in the presence of sunlight. In a closed cycle, this would be a carbon-neutral way to go. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/23/carbon-dioxide-fuel.html
Let's say, motorized personal transport. I'd be down with making it just as hard to get and then keep a driver's license as a pilot's license, which would have this effect. Other side effects would include depopulating those soul-killing suburbs and exurbs, bumping up civic life, making it possible for us to go carbon-negative instead of just carbon-neutral, and last, but not least, listening to all the whiny libertarepublicans moan helplessly.
A lot of people work at the minimum wage or effectively less than that--think wait staff at restaurants. $750 may be "measly" to you, but to somebody who just barely makes rent and food on a low income, it's an amount of money they may never have had all at once.
Try Common Table Expressions. All the cool database management systems have them :)
The difference in needed infrastructure between power and internet is approximately the difference in energy provided. Internet access can be provided for days or weeks off a relatively small battery pack, assuming that the sun doesn't shine over that time. Years otherwise. Electric power for that time requires large energy stores and generation capacity.
Let's try comparing apples to apples :)
It's a word used in chemistry, surface science and materials engineering. In that context, it means "add a functional group." http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/functionalize
and when you don't, don't. Simple, really. If you're raking in the bucks, you need to take more buck-related responsibility. Under a regime like this, proprietary software goes to the teensy niche where it belongs.
This is the beauty of being an open source project like
PostgreSQL instead of an open source product like MySQL. The
former means that companies can join and leave the effort, as has happened
several times so far and will again for PostgreSQL. The latter means the
project's health is tightly tied to the vagaries of that one company.
You forgot Step 13: [Make love to] Linux!