Honestly, I think PostgreSQL is the ideal RDBMS for SME's. It has many of the advantages of MS SQL without the OLAP stuff, but has a team exceptionally committed to correct operation of the database, something MySQL has never had. Pg's performance is extremely good under complex workloads, and it is exceptionally robust. Really about the only thing it doesn't do is scale vertically as well as DB2, Oracle, or Terradata.....
BTW, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the worker in this scenario. I have run into one employer once (and not at a job interview fortunately) who expected all employees to have a specific political ideology. If I was seeking a job and such came up, I would be very clear that my political views were my own and that no employer had a right to tell control them.
I have run into subtle pressure. For example, when I worked at Microsoft a lot of my co-workers opposed Maria Cantwell just because she came from a competing company. Something about company loyalty.
Anyway, I looked at issues, decided I liked Cantwell better than Gordon and said so. It was controversial but it had no impact on my career.
Basically, if you don't stand up for your viewpoints, you can't expect anyone else to stand up for you either. If you are going to be in a work environment which requires this, leave it or at least disagree with the policy and stand up for others. Failing that, such an environment is no good to work in anyway.
Looking at the screenshots, I think there were some fairly cool ideas in Bob which the industry could learn from. Like many MS products thought I can say "Great ideas! Terrible Implementations!"
I particularly like the way it seems to have been designed to mimic paper-and-pen methods for doing things. Even if the approach was childish and gimicky, it looks like some of the basic UI decisions were in the right direction, if implemented badly.
Triple redundancy isn't going to protect you against drunks, sleepy drivers, idiot teenagers, poor weather, idiots without their headlights on in the rain, etc.
True, but this has been true in the past. As we move forward to more and more computerization on cars, the number of types of failures which can result in fatalities will increase. For example, while it is true that accellerators can stick in mechanical systems, they can only stick after being set to a setting. This is represents an additional error condition which, while present in drive-by-wire, exists along side processing mistakes.
I do think that triple redundancy for the main systems (steering, braking, acceleration) would be a good idea. Personally I would be quite happy if the federal government were to mandate this on all drive-by-wire cars. Sure, it's a small risk but why should drive-by-wire cars be less safe than their mechanical counterparts (i.e. mechanical brakes with ABS for example)?
Finally I am not entirely sold on the idea of drive by wire as generally applicable. In most cases one is adding complexity to a system without doing what is necessary to make it an actual safety improvement. See the recent IEEE Spectrum article "Automated to Death..."
Second, I don't know of many cars where braking and steering are completely computerized. As long as those two systems retain a manual actuation ability, you can stop the car.
Question (assuming worst possible failure): What level of strength is required to stop a car where power braking has failed but where the accellerator is stuck all the way open?
Unfortunately exposing indexes to the query wouldn't solve the problem you are describing. Let me tell you a story:
I deployed a POS solution for a retail customer backed by an RDBMS. For a year everything went fine. Then all the sudden the invoices were taking 45 seconds to post and re-initialize. Obviously this is not good for a cash-register-type program.
After some debugging I discovered the problem was in CBP areas. I asked about it on the PostgreSQL list and got an insightful answer from Tom Lane.
Basically, PostgreSQL makes a number of pessimistic assumptions about tables which were entirely empty at last check. In particular it assumes they may be being filled in quickly. Since my customer wasn't using two of the tables involved in one of the queries, it was assuming these took up ten disk pages and hence shifted from a hash join to a nested loop...... Indexes wouldn't have solved the problem. What I had to do was find the problem queries and patch them for that customer.
Furthermore, I think basic queries should not have hints exposed. However, prepared statements should have hints exposed because you lack enough information in the preparation of the query to choose a good plan. Here, and only here, should indexes be exposed to the query.
The "parse a string" API is simply indefensible when you want to build queries modularly, especially when there's no standardized grammar that's actually worth a damn for implementers. Even now the SQL standard still has no concept of indexes, so you will always be in vendor-land there.
I think you are way off base here. Really you have three ways to build queries in a modular fashion in SQL: 1) Use views 2) Use user defined functions 3) Use some sort of SQL abstraction layer like an ORM.
In all cases you still are parsing a string, but your queries can be modular and have some code reuse. The real problem though is that you are looking at the RDBMS wrong.
You might as well say "The parse a string API (HTTP) is indefensible when you want to build web pages modularly....."
People like C.J. Date have issues with nulls too, but most people do grudgingly admit that they have their uses in the real world. This doesn't make them suck any less when it comes to dealing with tri-valued logic everywhere (or more accurately, the unpredictable ad-hoc behaviors you get on a per-app basis when they map it onto bi-valued logic)
That's a good reason to put null handling into the db layer (i.e. properly handle it in your queries). I dunno about you but I think it is more important for a math engine to be mathematically correct to at least a reasonable approximation of correct than for it to be easy for programmers to integrate. I may be weird though.....
How much money does it take to make up for the fact that you were born?
To show standing you have to show that you were harmed. Here the harm is being born. The duty that the GP thinks the parents have is to kill you. Therefore you can sue because you aren't dead.
But let's extend this a bit further. Now suppose I get hit by a car and suffer a brain injury which leaves me disabled for the rest of my life. By the same token I could sue the doctors and those responsible for substitute decision making for not letting me die without a do not resuscitate order or the like. "Oh wait," I hear people shout: "it's legally different to abort a fetus and to disconnect life support!" True, but it seems to me the standing issues would be the same.
But there's more. If they let you die, then your family could sue, right?
If a lawsuit like this ever gets to trial remind me to drop everything, go to law school, and become a litigator.....
You are assuming you are flipping bits on the chip and not in the input mechanism (wires carrying data), right? Also are all the sensors digital or do you have any analog sensors etc?
I would be surprised if cell phones, etc. caused interference of wires running around the engine compartment. Other electrical current sources though (a malfunctioning motor, for example) would seem to be a much more likely cause.
Given that cars cause more fatalities per mile travelled than planes, why don't we have more redundancy in drive-by-wire systems? One would think we would try to have something really well proven.
Chances are this isn't caused by cosmic rays or other radiation but something really mundane, like a sensor failing in an unexpected way triggering a software bug which causes the uncommanded events.
There is one area where RDBMS's bring substantial performance improvements to the table: after-the-fact reporting.
In a hierarchical database or a flat file, you generally have to read all the data into your program to generate a report if the database wasn't designed from the beginning with the report you are generating in mind. In an RDBMS or similar, you have sophisticated aggregate and join capabilities which generally can save a lot of time in this area.
Clarification in case it isn't clear: I mean no therapy should be allowed unless the subject of the therapy (and not a substitute decision-maker) is able (where the nature of the disorder does not inherently prevent it) to articulate an understanding of risks and benefits and provide independent consent. What bothers me is the idea of changing kids' DNA just because parents are worried.
How could you possibly interpret me as saying that? A person doesn't want the cure, fine - that's his/her choice. I was excruciatingly clear on that. What I objected to was your deciding that every single person so afflicted must make the choice you did. I think it's immoral for anyone to make either choice for someone else. I can't believe I'm repeating myself when I was quite verbose about this before.
That's fine. I don't really have a problem with that. I would add one caveat though: I think that, with the exception of serious neurological disorders which render the individual inherently incapable of consent, I don't think parental consent should be enough. I think one should be able to wait until the child is able to decide for him/herself. That doesn't necessarily require waiting until the age of majority. However, the child should be able to discuss the risks and be required to enter consent as well.
Anyone that thinks that relational databases are the end-all-be-all of persistent data storage hasn't done enough relational database development to understand some of the limitations.
Well, there are some important and underrated strengths of RDBMS's in this area. No, I don't believe that RDBMS's should replace temp files, and even XML has it's uses. However, for anything you might possibly need to do complex reporting on at any point in the future, RDBMS's are the way to go. This is the single biggest reason to use an RDBMS. Also where you already use an RDBMS, often it can be useful for other bits of info which are outside of the core RDBMS area.
For example, LedgerSMB uses key/value modelling to store application menus and application settings. The data model sucks because one is representing freeform data in a tool designed for highly structured data. However, we put it in the db because it adds less complexity than adding yet another storage media.
So it's not just the complexity of the data model. And RDBMS's aren't perfect for all things. However, I would be very surprised of Twitter or Facebook started putting their real business data in NoSQL databases.....
You are right. There is no comparison. Having worked with POS frameworks and the like I can tell you performance is a MUCH bigger issue there.
Interestingly the two largest databases I help with regarding LedgerSMB are a financial services business with over a hundred employees and the other is a convenience store with two tills. And with the POS environment, you have to have top performance. A 10 second delay is something that needs to be fixed quickly and a 30 second delay is almost unworkable. So yes, no comparison. Performance is MUCH more important on the brick and mortar retail end.....
PostgreSQL does have some limits. These include the lack of parallel execution of queries across nodes in a cluster (this is something Green Plum DB has added). Once you are in the TB range, and processing GB of data in each query, you have some inherent performance issues which the application is not able to solve in its current architecture.
The solution at that point is to see whether any of Green Plum's proprietary products (built on PostgreSQL) will fill that gap in your operations.
OK, so enlighten us with your brilliance! Share with us the ultimate answer of what should be done to differentiate a null (logically, "I don't know") with a blank string (logically, "We know there's nothing there") and what should be done differently?
Well, the way PostgreSQL handles it is that a NULL is stored as a NULL and treated as one (i.e. NULL || ' more text' evaluates to NULL). '' is stored as an empty string and processed as one (i.e. '' || ' more text') evaluates to ' more text'
Really, that strikes me as the correct way to do things (that seems obvious...). Oracle OTOH is braindead in its approach of treating NULLs and empty strings as equivalent.
You know, there are a few things I dislike about SQL but in general I have a lot of good things to say about it. The first one is that declarative logic rocks! I love being able to define valid data and data constraints and be able to guarantee that these are followed!
It was designed from the start as a language that would be integrated into others, and yet simple real world realities make that impossible, with 99% of implementations being of the "Build a large string, and pass that string to "the SQL connector" to be parsed and interpreted" form.
In general, I try to minimize this by using user defined functions as named queries. That simplifies things a great deal. However, part of the issue is that SQL is designed to be a declarative language. I.e. you declare a set of mutually dependant set operations which are then parsed and executed. This is just different from the way procedural (and structured, and object oriented) languages operate.
Its handling of null and the empty string is incomprehensible and useless, in part because nobody involved ever had the cajones to do what needed to be done with both.
You are either talking specifically about Oracle or you have a very different idea of what is incomprehensible and useless. (Yes the fact that Oracle treats empty string and nulls as equivalent is truly braindead.)
To this you add another component that's always an issue: the entirely haphazard way in which relational databases are implemented on most operating systems, whereby the DBMS is another application, that manages its own files, and needs to be coached with kind words and a happy smile in order to get anything done.
Maybe I am spoiled by PostgreSQL, but I have absolutely no idea what your complaint is here. Also note that Pg is quite capable of drawing user accounts from an external source, like the system (PAM), LDAP, Kerberos, or even the cn of the client cert used to connect via SSL.
There are some braindead things about the SQL spec. I think the folding to upper case is a braindead element I am glad that PostgreSQL avoids. However it really sounds to me like you are using the RDBMS wrong.
BTW, I do agree there are some cases where NULL handling is problematic. However, these are generally corner-case issues and SQL is probably easier to understand that what the mathematically correct behavior would be. Or course, from a mathematically correct viewpoint (TRUE or TRUE) should evaluate to FALSE but no programming language is that pedantic.
When you suggest I am callous in terms of suggesting I was better off for the hardships I have gone through, and suggest I am advocating a point of view that one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, aren't you advocating breaking eggs in a different way? I.e. taking away some level of hardship on the off chance that the person might fail would rob of the Sir Richard Bransons of the world who attribute their successes to having to find other ways of coping with neurological disorders.....
I suggest that you are not trying to avoid cracking eggs, you are just trying to crack the exceptionally successful eggs. Why?
For every success story like yours, how many fell by the wayside because they didn't have what it took to make it in this cruel world under the burden of their handicap? Or who simply had one too many problems to get out from under them? Shall we just tell them as they reach the end of their endurance and give up because it's just too painful that well, there was something that could have helped them by curing some or all of their problems but that society had deemed it immoral to take away the thing that made them special?
Are you saying we should rob folks like me of a chance to excel because someone else might not? That's absurd. A much better approach would be to look at what approaches to parenting would maximize chances of success despite such disorders.
The area I am worried about though is the social desire to alleviate hardship and make life nice for our children. While this is a laudable goal, nothing replaces the gains made by blood, sweat, and tears. Our muscles require resistance to provide us with physical strength. Our "spirits" (in the sense of mental and emotional composition) require resistance to provide us with strength of character and spirit.
We should not take away these things.
I have a personal horse in this race. I have fairly severe ADD, and I can tell you the difficulties I went through as a child (being the one who was ALWAYS picked on, who had severe trouble with school work despite being obviously bright, etc) helped make me into a better (and even happier) person.
I have severe attention deficit disorder. Of the people I have met, my ADD is one of the worst. Compared to my father and grandfather, I have it worse simply because my mother went into premature labor which the physicians treated with alcohol. My ADD is so bad that there are certain things my brain simply CANNOT do. For example, when I was in High School, I could understand analytical geometry. It is not a "learning" disorder because I can learn just about anything. It is a cognitive disorder because it prevents me from cognitively DOING some things. I could explain it well enough that a struggling student could improve markedly. However, I couldn't DO the problems. It is something I struggle with every day. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to understand a problem perfectly and how to solve it, but be unable to solve it.
Everyone in my family that has ADD is quite successful. Even my great-grandfather probably had it and he was a very important chemist in his day (Morris William Travers). My own experience is that the struggle against this disorder has forced me to excel far beyond what I would have otherwise.
I am not alone. Sir Richard Branson credits his success on his dyslexia. I have always been a stubborn one..... Even if you asked me during the worst years of my school experience if I would trade in everything to be normal, I would have said no. But what of my parents who were really worried about me? Would they have done something against my will if it was available? I hope not but I am sincerely glad that was not an option.
My son has ADD and is struggling in some ways that I didn't. My wife wishes horribly that he was normal. I am glad he is not: I am sure he will have a happy, fulfilling, and successful life despite the added challenges and will be stronger for it.
I think that this sort of therapy does pose moral issues because it is too close to some of my own difficulties. Yet those difficulties have made me a better person. Moreover, those difficulties (including the fact that I was bullied repeatedly during my years in elementary and middle school) have provided me an opportunity to be cheerful through misfortune that I might otherwise have been overcome by. I have the courage to go my own way and the inward strength to be happy even when circumstances are fairly adverse. I sincerely hope that this sort of therapy for things like ADD is NEVER an option.
I am not sure. This is basically a contract case. Basically the jury has to decide whether:
1) SCO what did SCO buy in their asset purchase agreement? Was it the UNIX business? Did that include EXCLUSIVE ownership of the code? 2) Was Novell attempting to screw SCO over unfairly despite the contract?
This is not the copyright case. This is not a slander of title case even. It is a simple case of two companies engaging in a business deal and one of them later challenging the performance of the other under that deal. I think it is clear as day, and think the jury will see also that since SCO was required to pay royalties to Novell under the APA, they couldn't have purchased the copyrights.
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Honestly, I think PostgreSQL is the ideal RDBMS for SME's. It has many of the advantages of MS SQL without the OLAP stuff, but has a team exceptionally committed to correct operation of the database, something MySQL has never had. Pg's performance is extremely good under complex workloads, and it is exceptionally robust. Really about the only thing it doesn't do is scale vertically as well as DB2, Oracle, or Terradata.....
BTW, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the worker in this scenario. I have run into one employer once (and not at a job interview fortunately) who expected all employees to have a specific political ideology. If I was seeking a job and such came up, I would be very clear that my political views were my own and that no employer had a right to tell control them.
I have run into subtle pressure. For example, when I worked at Microsoft a lot of my co-workers opposed Maria Cantwell just because she came from a competing company. Something about company loyalty.
Anyway, I looked at issues, decided I liked Cantwell better than Gordon and said so. It was controversial but it had no impact on my career.
Basically, if you don't stand up for your viewpoints, you can't expect anyone else to stand up for you either. If you are going to be in a work environment which requires this, leave it or at least disagree with the policy and stand up for others. Failing that, such an environment is no good to work in anyway.
Simpler solution:
1) Don't work for assholes.....
Just to note: That was to describe some of the apps. Navigating around the system seems poorly thought out....
Looking at the screenshots, I think there were some fairly cool ideas in Bob which the industry could learn from. Like many MS products thought I can say "Great ideas! Terrible Implementations!"
I particularly like the way it seems to have been designed to mimic paper-and-pen methods for doing things. Even if the approach was childish and gimicky, it looks like some of the basic UI decisions were in the right direction, if implemented badly.
True, but this has been true in the past. As we move forward to more and more computerization on cars, the number of types of failures which can result in fatalities will increase. For example, while it is true that accellerators can stick in mechanical systems, they can only stick after being set to a setting. This is represents an additional error condition which, while present in drive-by-wire, exists along side processing mistakes.
I do think that triple redundancy for the main systems (steering, braking, acceleration) would be a good idea. Personally I would be quite happy if the federal government were to mandate this on all drive-by-wire cars. Sure, it's a small risk but why should drive-by-wire cars be less safe than their mechanical counterparts (i.e. mechanical brakes with ABS for example)?
Finally I am not entirely sold on the idea of drive by wire as generally applicable. In most cases one is adding complexity to a system without doing what is necessary to make it an actual safety improvement. See the recent IEEE Spectrum article "Automated to Death..."
Question (assuming worst possible failure): What level of strength is required to stop a car where power braking has failed but where the accellerator is stuck all the way open?
I assumed he was talking about Oracle.... MySQL handles empty strings and nulls as equivalent too? That sucks.....
Unfortunately exposing indexes to the query wouldn't solve the problem you are describing. Let me tell you a story:
I deployed a POS solution for a retail customer backed by an RDBMS. For a year everything went fine. Then all the sudden the invoices were taking 45 seconds to post and re-initialize. Obviously this is not good for a cash-register-type program.
After some debugging I discovered the problem was in CBP areas. I asked about it on the PostgreSQL list and got an insightful answer from Tom Lane.
Basically, PostgreSQL makes a number of pessimistic assumptions about tables which were entirely empty at last check. In particular it assumes they may be being filled in quickly. Since my customer wasn't using two of the tables involved in one of the queries, it was assuming these took up ten disk pages and hence shifted from a hash join to a nested loop...... Indexes wouldn't have solved the problem. What I had to do was find the problem queries and patch them for that customer.
Furthermore, I think basic queries should not have hints exposed. However, prepared statements should have hints exposed because you lack enough information in the preparation of the query to choose a good plan. Here, and only here, should indexes be exposed to the query.
I think you are way off base here. Really you have three ways to build queries in a modular fashion in SQL:
1) Use views
2) Use user defined functions
3) Use some sort of SQL abstraction layer like an ORM.
In all cases you still are parsing a string, but your queries can be modular and have some code reuse. The real problem though is that you are looking at the RDBMS wrong.
You might as well say "The parse a string API (HTTP) is indefensible when you want to build web pages modularly....."
That's a good reason to put null handling into the db layer (i.e. properly handle it in your queries). I dunno about you but I think it is more important for a math engine to be mathematically correct to at least a reasonable approximation of correct than for it to be easy for programmers to integrate. I may be weird though.....
To show standing you have to show that you were harmed. Here the harm is being born. The duty that the GP thinks the parents have is to kill you. Therefore you can sue because you aren't dead.
But let's extend this a bit further. Now suppose I get hit by a car and suffer a brain injury which leaves me disabled for the rest of my life. By the same token I could sue the doctors and those responsible for substitute decision making for not letting me die without a do not resuscitate order or the like. "Oh wait," I hear people shout: "it's legally different to abort a fetus and to disconnect life support!" True, but it seems to me the standing issues would be the same.
But there's more. If they let you die, then your family could sue, right?
If a lawsuit like this ever gets to trial remind me to drop everything, go to law school, and become a litigator.....
You are assuming you are flipping bits on the chip and not in the input mechanism (wires carrying data), right? Also are all the sensors digital or do you have any analog sensors etc?
I would be surprised if cell phones, etc. caused interference of wires running around the engine compartment. Other electrical current sources though (a malfunctioning motor, for example) would seem to be a much more likely cause.
Given that cars cause more fatalities per mile travelled than planes, why don't we have more redundancy in drive-by-wire systems? One would think we would try to have something really well proven.
Chances are this isn't caused by cosmic rays or other radiation but something really mundane, like a sensor failing in an unexpected way triggering a software bug which causes the uncommanded events.
There is one area where RDBMS's bring substantial performance improvements to the table: after-the-fact reporting.
In a hierarchical database or a flat file, you generally have to read all the data into your program to generate a report if the database wasn't designed from the beginning with the report you are generating in mind. In an RDBMS or similar, you have sophisticated aggregate and join capabilities which generally can save a lot of time in this area.
Clarification in case it isn't clear: I mean no therapy should be allowed unless the subject of the therapy (and not a substitute decision-maker) is able (where the nature of the disorder does not inherently prevent it) to articulate an understanding of risks and benefits and provide independent consent. What bothers me is the idea of changing kids' DNA just because parents are worried.
That's fine. I don't really have a problem with that. I would add one caveat though: I think that, with the exception of serious neurological disorders which render the individual inherently incapable of consent, I don't think parental consent should be enough. I think one should be able to wait until the child is able to decide for him/herself. That doesn't necessarily require waiting until the age of majority. However, the child should be able to discuss the risks and be required to enter consent as well.
Well, there are some important and underrated strengths of RDBMS's in this area. No, I don't believe that RDBMS's should replace temp files, and even XML has it's uses. However, for anything you might possibly need to do complex reporting on at any point in the future, RDBMS's are the way to go. This is the single biggest reason to use an RDBMS. Also where you already use an RDBMS, often it can be useful for other bits of info which are outside of the core RDBMS area.
For example, LedgerSMB uses key/value modelling to store application menus and application settings. The data model sucks because one is representing freeform data in a tool designed for highly structured data. However, we put it in the db because it adds less complexity than adding yet another storage media.
So it's not just the complexity of the data model. And RDBMS's aren't perfect for all things. However, I would be very surprised of Twitter or Facebook started putting their real business data in NoSQL databases.....
You are right. There is no comparison. Having worked with POS frameworks and the like I can tell you performance is a MUCH bigger issue there.
Interestingly the two largest databases I help with regarding LedgerSMB are a financial services business with over a hundred employees and the other is a convenience store with two tills. And with the POS environment, you have to have top performance. A 10 second delay is something that needs to be fixed quickly and a 30 second delay is almost unworkable. So yes, no comparison. Performance is MUCH more important on the brick and mortar retail end.....
PostgreSQL does have some limits. These include the lack of parallel execution of queries across nodes in a cluster (this is something Green Plum DB has added). Once you are in the TB range, and processing GB of data in each query, you have some inherent performance issues which the application is not able to solve in its current architecture.
The solution at that point is to see whether any of Green Plum's proprietary products (built on PostgreSQL) will fill that gap in your operations.
Well, the way PostgreSQL handles it is that a NULL is stored as a NULL and treated as one (i.e. NULL || ' more text' evaluates to NULL). '' is stored as an empty string and processed as one (i.e. '' || ' more text') evaluates to ' more text'
Really, that strikes me as the correct way to do things (that seems obvious...). Oracle OTOH is braindead in its approach of treating NULLs and empty strings as equivalent.
You know, there are a few things I dislike about SQL but in general I have a lot of good things to say about it. The first one is that declarative logic rocks! I love being able to define valid data and data constraints and be able to guarantee that these are followed!
In general, I try to minimize this by using user defined functions as named queries. That simplifies things a great deal. However, part of the issue is that SQL is designed to be a declarative language. I.e. you declare a set of mutually dependant set operations which are then parsed and executed. This is just different from the way procedural (and structured, and object oriented) languages operate.
You are either talking specifically about Oracle or you have a very different idea of what is incomprehensible and useless. (Yes the fact that Oracle treats empty string and nulls as equivalent is truly braindead.)
Maybe I am spoiled by PostgreSQL, but I have absolutely no idea what your complaint is here. Also note that Pg is quite capable of drawing user accounts from an external source, like the system (PAM), LDAP, Kerberos, or even the cn of the client cert used to connect via SSL.
There are some braindead things about the SQL spec. I think the folding to upper case is a braindead element I am glad that PostgreSQL avoids. However it really sounds to me like you are using the RDBMS wrong.
BTW, I do agree there are some cases where NULL handling is problematic. However, these are generally corner-case issues and SQL is probably easier to understand that what the mathematically correct behavior would be. Or course, from a mathematically correct viewpoint (TRUE or TRUE) should evaluate to FALSE but no programming language is that pedantic.
I am curious:
When you suggest I am callous in terms of suggesting I was better off for the hardships I have gone through, and suggest I am advocating a point of view that one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, aren't you advocating breaking eggs in a different way? I.e. taking away some level of hardship on the off chance that the person might fail would rob of the Sir Richard Bransons of the world who attribute their successes to having to find other ways of coping with neurological disorders.....
I suggest that you are not trying to avoid cracking eggs, you are just trying to crack the exceptionally successful eggs. Why?
Are you saying we should rob folks like me of a chance to excel because someone else might not? That's absurd. A much better approach would be to look at what approaches to parenting would maximize chances of success despite such disorders.
The area I am worried about though is the social desire to alleviate hardship and make life nice for our children. While this is a laudable goal, nothing replaces the gains made by blood, sweat, and tears. Our muscles require resistance to provide us with physical strength. Our "spirits" (in the sense of mental and emotional composition) require resistance to provide us with strength of character and spirit.
We should not take away these things.
I have a personal horse in this race. I have fairly severe ADD, and I can tell you the difficulties I went through as a child (being the one who was ALWAYS picked on, who had severe trouble with school work despite being obviously bright, etc) helped make me into a better (and even happier) person.
I have severe attention deficit disorder. Of the people I have met, my ADD is one of the worst. Compared to my father and grandfather, I have it worse simply because my mother went into premature labor which the physicians treated with alcohol. My ADD is so bad that there are certain things my brain simply CANNOT do. For example, when I was in High School, I could understand analytical geometry. It is not a "learning" disorder because I can learn just about anything. It is a cognitive disorder because it prevents me from cognitively DOING some things. I could explain it well enough that a struggling student could improve markedly. However, I couldn't DO the problems. It is something I struggle with every day. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to understand a problem perfectly and how to solve it, but be unable to solve it.
Everyone in my family that has ADD is quite successful. Even my great-grandfather probably had it and he was a very important chemist in his day (Morris William Travers). My own experience is that the struggle against this disorder has forced me to excel far beyond what I would have otherwise.
I am not alone. Sir Richard Branson credits his success on his dyslexia. I have always been a stubborn one..... Even if you asked me during the worst years of my school experience if I would trade in everything to be normal, I would have said no. But what of my parents who were really worried about me? Would they have done something against my will if it was available? I hope not but I am sincerely glad that was not an option.
My son has ADD and is struggling in some ways that I didn't. My wife wishes horribly that he was normal. I am glad he is not: I am sure he will have a happy, fulfilling, and successful life despite the added challenges and will be stronger for it.
I think that this sort of therapy does pose moral issues because it is too close to some of my own difficulties. Yet those difficulties have made me a better person. Moreover, those difficulties (including the fact that I was bullied repeatedly during my years in elementary and middle school) have provided me an opportunity to be cheerful through misfortune that I might otherwise have been overcome by. I have the courage to go my own way and the inward strength to be happy even when circumstances are fairly adverse. I sincerely hope that this sort of therapy for things like ADD is NEVER an option.
I am not sure. This is basically a contract case. Basically the jury has to decide whether:
1) SCO what did SCO buy in their asset purchase agreement? Was it the UNIX business? Did that include EXCLUSIVE ownership of the code?
2) Was Novell attempting to screw SCO over unfairly despite the contract?
This is not the copyright case. This is not a slander of title case even. It is a simple case of two companies engaging in a business deal and one of them later challenging the performance of the other under that deal. I think it is clear as day, and think the jury will see also that since SCO was required to pay royalties to Novell under the APA, they couldn't have purchased the copyrights.