I don't know. When you are struggling with and nearly holding your own against three cops, I am hard pressed to criticizing them for tasing him the first time. At some point you have to consider that there is a possibility of serious bodily harm to the officers whether or not the suspect is armed.
Disagree. Give me a choice of a standard 9mm handgun or a taser when being charged by someone with a knife and I would choose the taser. The issue is that the jolt of electricity is far more likely to stop the charge than a bullet is. Remember that the Moros used to charge US marines in the Phillipines and even after taking mortal wounds from the guns of the day, would still often kill US soldiers with their spiked clubs. If you are choosing the gun, you have to be prepared to use it as a hand-to-hand weapon, not just shoot someone with it.
I think you are getting at my immediate reaction, which is that use of a taser may or may not constitute torture based upon the general context of the situation.
Are there cases where it is torture? I would bet good money that there are. After all, electric shock is a common instrument of torture around the world.
Are there cases where it is not? Yes, absolutely. I would be hard pressed to call the use of tasers when faced with deadly force (an assailant charging with a knife, for example) torture (and in these cases, it may be safer for the police than a gun (most guns are not guaranteed to stop the charge, but the electrical jolt of a taser will).
The Beslan children may have been killed by the Russian special forces, who also appear to have interfered with mediation efforts (poisoning of Politkovskaya). Yes, one can say it was indirectly by the terrorists, but this does not absolve the Russian military of their responsibility in the matter. With the death of Politkovskaya (after she has started publicly voicing her allegations), Litvinenko (killed by Polonium from a Russian nuclear reactor while investigating Politkovskaya's murder), and others, it looks like this was sufficiently worth silencing to kill dissidents both at home and abroad.
The Kursk issue had to do with how the rescue and recovery was handled rather than the accident itself. At the time, many Russians opposed Putin's handling of the accident.
Personally I would hope you would give the Union of Socialist Democrats a chance. Their leader has done well in the past to the extent that he was awarded a Nobel Prize, and would do well again.
I think the problem is a little more subtle than that.
In the US, Republicans get elected by voting their party's call. THis is why John McCain can never get elected (he can't win the primaries. He could win the general election, however.) Sort of like two British satirists wrote in the 19th century: "I grew so rich that I was sent By pocket borough into Parliament I always voted my party's call And I never thought of thinking For myself at all... I thought so little they rewarded me By making me the ruler of the Queen's Navy"
The Democrats have a less unified position but the coalition of issues ends up forcing consistency on the part of their nominees as well. Consequently we are stuck with two dominant ideologies which cannot allow for other views or voices. THis is further enforced by the rules of the electoral college which more or less preclude more than two viable parties from putting candidates up for election (because if no candidate gets more than 50% of the electoral votes, it goes to the house of representatives, which will almost certainly vote along party lines).
Additionally we have a problem in the US, as you do in Russia, where the intelligence and military organizations run a lot of the international politics from behind the scenes. This is a common problem internationally.... Putin on his record could have gone two ways (either extending the reign of the military and intelligence organizations or reining them in. He chose the former-- a good example of what might have been is found in Indonesia's president who has reined these in despite having a background similar to Putin). So there is often an appearance of dictatorship here, but it has not yet come to the point of generally infringing on individual liberty (it does threaten to, however).
Personally I am a big fan of the Union of Socialist Democrats:-) Russia would be better off having their Nobel laureate leader in office than with Putin:-).
Putin is only popular because of the manipulation of the press. Otherwise, incidents like the Kursk and reasonable rational inqueries into who really killed the kids in Beslan would have destroyed him long ago.
I think there are a couple points which need to be understood regarding Iraq, etc.
First, the occupation is a part of an imperialist concern over security (not control) of oil supplies which has been a major issue since WWII. Remember that the decisive defeat of the Japanese Navy during WWII was decisive because it cut off Japan's access to (you guessed it) oil. Both economically and militarily, we are dependent on oil for everything from jet fuel (though now liquified coal can be used) to fuel for most ground vehicles and manufacturing operations.
Hence there is a psychological if not military need for the US to keep troops in the Persian Gulf area. If not in Saudi Arabia, then in Iraq. The initial strategy wrt Iraq did involve the struggle against Al Qaeda. Knowing that the troops in Saudi Arabia give the Salafist wing of Al Qaeda (including bin Ladin) ample fuel for their propaganda, and knowing that Saddam was the target of the Qutbist wing (including Zawahiri), the goal was to get rid of both these propaganda targets and thus weaken the political support of Al Qaeda throughout the Middle East. I, and many others, said at the time that this was going to backfire and it did (it is now a better recruiting tool for Al Qaeda than either Saddam nor the troops in Saudi Arabia were).
The basic issue is that wars of occupation are not won through military strength. They are won instead through careful planning of the reconstruction and a genuine ability to bring a better, more stable state than either the previous government or any alternative (the second prerequisite is that one must also be credible). This is where we should be focusing the majority of our military effort and we are unwilling to do so. This means that, especially in light of the complaints against Blackwater their contracts ought to be suspended (and the Iraqi government needs to persue ever legal option against them including suing them in US courts, since according to various administrative regulations those courts alone have jurisdiction. The second area which needs to be done is amending the Iraqi Constitution to grant the Iraqi courts have jurisdiction regardless of US-written administrative regulations). We also need to take a hard line with the Iraqi government and state that if any department is allowed to use militias in any official or unofficial capacity, we will withdraw our protection, and that we will be happy to leave if asked.
BTW, reliance on mercinaries is always bad business in these sorts of things. Those mercenaries have an interest in keeping the conflict going.
Finally, we should announce that we are going to be involved until a stable and representative Iraqi government exists, but that we are happy to start the process over as often as necessary to make it happen.
I am going to disagree with the GP about the Iraqi Army. The fact is that despite its problems, it is the one organization in Iraq which seems to be helping to unify the country.
There is no longer any influence that can challenge Putin. I wish that the Union of Social Democrats could do so (I think that they represent the best attempt at creating a uniquely Russian republic), but I also think that things are impossible to change. In fact the current leader of the USD helped to roll back Putin's authoritarianism for a while early in his rule. However, with state control over the media, and the distraction of Chechnya, it seems difficult to see this happen.
BTW, one of the real eye-openers for me was when I read "Perestroika" by Gorbachev. I highly recommend reading it to get a very different point of view regarding governance during the Soviet days. I think that it also helps to clarify where Russia is at the moment.
Are you saying that his tampering with the elections is unnecessary (i.e. preventing contributions to opponents, rigging the news, and outright assassinating some opponents)?
Are you saying that it is unnecessary to ammend the Constitution to give him direct control over the appointment of various officials previously elected, that he would get his way anyway?
Of course, aside from the assassinations, state-run media, and over-all subtle politics of opposition, Saddam probably didn't rig the elections directly and probably seemed in many ways to tamper with them even less than Putin;-)
Of course he expected fallout. However, on the balance, they accomplished a goal-- to silence criticism of what is/what was going on in Russia. Sure as an American, I may find it scary that Lugovoy is being treated as a hero in the Litvinenko assassination, but then I suppose we have Ollie North....
The main point, however, is that I would be very concerned about talking with Russian emigrants about their experience under Putin. I would be afraid I might put their lives at risk. That, I think was the point.
Before you go too far idolizing Putin, remember the Kursk.
Again, there is a tradeoff in moving towards dictatorship that the Russian people have to decide. It is not my decision, but when this starts to undermine the safety of people who are under the protection of other governments, I draw the line.
I don't know. It seems like there is a real lack of information as to what is going on.
From Interfax.ru:
"Kasparov and several other people have been delivered to the Meshchansky Court, but so far it is not clear what charges they are facing as a lawyer is not being allowed inside," Prokhorov told journalists.
I am not so sure about this. Kasparov's "fear-mongering" about the end of democracy in Russia seem more fact based than one might otherwise think.
Look, I am not saying that Russia doesn't have the right to choose a system which trades central control over infrastructure development and management of the country instead of one which safeguards individual liberty. This is a choice for Russians alone and I don't think we should interfere with that part itself. However, when Putin starts assassinating dissidents outside of Russia, then he crosses a line which makes him pretty clearly a problem everyone in the world has to face. We *should* have done this when Litvinenko was assassinated with polonium from a Russian nuclear reactor. Maybe this will help people start to realize the danger that Putin poses outside Russia.
Sure we can. We could make a strategic decision to purchase oil from Iran and embargo Russia;-) We could and probably should add Russia to the list of state sponsors of terrorism (I started arguing this after Litvinenko's assassination). And we could start working with China to isolate Russia economically. Quite frankly if Putin wants to terrorize Russian dissidents inside Russia, that is a problem that the Russian people need to take responsibility for evaluating, but when he is ordering assassination of dissidents in other countries, then that crosses a line which we must not allow to be crossed.
However, your criticisms of democracy are fair criticisms. In reality, democracy's only redeeming value is that it is one additional protection of the people against the harms of arbitrary government. In cases where dictators are reasonably well-intentioned and mostly focused with getting the right things done (like Malaysia) they work quite a bit better on all levels than disfunctional democracies (Malaysia has a better human and possibly even civil rights record than Indonesia which is democratic). I think that there are two human rights which must be respected above all others: the right to collective self-determinism and the right to equal treatment before the laws. While Putin is arguably infringing on the latter, only when he crosses the line to order assassinations elsewhere does he move into areas which make this problem our responsibility.
Certainly this is a dark day for Russia. So was the Litvinenko and Politkovskaya assassinations. I am glad I don't live there:-).
However, your post is obviously either a troll or a flamebait. In order to help avoid future flames, I am going to try to answer some of your posts.
BTW, I am not a Muslim or a Christian. The main god I follow is one who represents human capacity and potential, and his name is Odin.
When it's about -> violence in muslim holy texts and the violent life of the paedophile prophet
The Bible is not without violence or pedophilia?
Note also that if we are looking at things from a modern perspective, Jesus's father (i.e. God if you are a Christian) would have been a pedophile since Mary would have been only 12-13 when conceiving Christ;-). Why this double standard? We should discuss issues for what they are rather than coming up with new ways to pick fights, for those will ultimately be turned back on one's own culture.
However you are also correct that Islam is not nor ever has been a religion of peace, except in the sense that there would be peace if everyone followed the same interpretation of Islamic law. Islam is indeed a religion of law, where social prescriptions are at the center of the religion. Any concept of a separation of mosque and state is foreign to Islam (although this is arguably the case with the separation of church and state in Christianity, there is no possible argument for such separation possible within an Islamic framework). So personally I do believe that Islam is inherently in conflict with our current ideas of religious freedom and the separation of temporal and sacred authority.
-> the relation (that indeed exists) between violence on tv/video games and violence in real life
I am not sure that we know what that relationship is. With violent crime rates at much lower rates than they were, say, 50 years ago, it is hard to make that comparison.
-> anything related to bush
Bush pronounced Putin's soul excellent, and has endeavored to cheat our legal system in ways which are frighteningly similar to what Putin has done. However, the difference is one of a great degree quantitatively, but not one qualitatively.
For example, seizing Mr Padilla, holding him without the right to Habeas Corpus guaranteed in our Constitution in such a way that Congress only can temporarily suspend (Habeas being the single greatest guardian of our liberty). Then, when the Supreme Court is set to rule on the case, they not only transfer him to civilian custody to avoid such a ruling but ask the 4th Circuit to vacate their current ruling so they can draw out the next case longer! If we didn't have our Constitution, there is no doubt in my mind that Putin and Bush would be no different.
-> discussion of the fact that abortion does indeed kill a human being and is thus not a laughing matter
I would not classify that as a statement of fact, but rather a statement of philosophy. Regardless of that, I don't think even many supporters of abortion rights see abortion as "a laughing matter."
-> science that contradicts global warming (it exists, and like everything in science, the true answer is "we don't know"), or even the science that states that a 6 degree rise in temperature will generate exactly 0 "extra disasters"
Of course, provided that rising sea levels from the melting of the antarctic ice caps, which then would flood a large part of Florida would not count as an "extra disaster..."
The fact is that we don't know what global warming will really bring. All our computer models are vastly oversimplified versions of the real world and hence they could all be wrong. For example However, we do know that the polar ice caps are melting (this is a matter of observation and not modelling) and that this does threaten to cause sea levels to rise. And that a large n
I would add that we saw the same thing with Fujomori in Peru-- a man who managed to bring an end to the horribly bloody civil war and then decided to stay in power after his term.
I am watching Ecuador's Correa but at the moment I think he is acting to preserve rather than undermine democracy. He has gone into things thus far with appropriate checks and balances, but we will see if that changes.
However, I see Putin as a very dangerous man in world politics. Under him, Russia might internally have some semblance of a rule of law (even if it is only a facade over a government of men), but domestically and internationally, Russia has become a state sponsor of terrorism. Everything that anyone ever accused Saddam of doing, Putin has done. But Putin is a better politician than Saddam, and Russia, like Saudi Arabia, has sufficient oil reserves to buy favor with Washington.
And another dissident investigating her death is poisoned with Polonium...
But Politkovskaya was no mere political dissident. She had been prevented from mediating an end to the standoff in Beslan but was poisoned on her way there. This lead her to accuse Putin of direct involvement in the school massacre. Soon after this, she is shot dead. Litvinenko, on investigating her death, is then poisoned with Polonium from a Russian nuclear reactor.
Even if Politkovskaya's allegations of Putin's involvement in the Beslan massacre turn out to be inaccurate, the subsequent assassination of both her and Litvinenko can only be called state sponsor of terrorism.
Look at the Litvenenko case. The assassination was designed to be clearly traceable to Russia (since you can fingerprint artificial isotopes to show what reactors they come from), and could not have been done without state help. Russia denies this, and this represents an assassination of a dissident emigrant specifically to warn other emigrants not to speak out against Putin. This is violence for the sole purpose of invoking terror, and it is arguably a greater threat to our way of life than Al Qaeda ever has been.
Fox News itself might be illegal, but all news has to be like Fox News, but from a pro-Putin rather than a Pro-Bush angle. Same sort of propaganda, but with a different target.
I would add that Iran is clearly far more democratic than Russia is today. Russia is more like Iraq under Saddam, where elections occur but nobody has any possibility of being elected except Putin. Despite meddling in the elections by the Council of Guardians, there are actual and real political dynamics which exist in Iran today. No such real dynamics occur under Russia today.
The big difference is that, unlike Saddam, Putin actually does have weapons of mass destruction.
To be honest, most applications behind small public web sites have needs for databases so simple that they are reasonable areas for beginners. My first real attempt at db design was for a CRM program which was not terribly well done. I made lots of stupid mistakes which more or less doomed the project. Most of these were due in part to a lack of understanding relating to the function of the RDBMS and also a lack of understanding the semantics of the data I was working with. The first would have been solved by reading more, but the second was a matter of inexperience (not really understanding where functional dependencies were, which makes normalization impossible anyway).
As for PostgreSQL vs MySQL, MySQL was really built for light-weight content management applications. It does these things admirably but doesn't really allow you to use an RDBMS to its real potential. Hence it is a good choice for some applications. However, for line of business tools, or wherever money is tracked in the db, you can run into problems. (Strict mode can be turned off by applications, an a lot of checks don't work if the table was accidently created as MyISAM.)
You need to understand that an RDBMS can be used to mathematically define valid data for the application. These constraints can be used to avoid whole classes of bugs in application code (where subtle data validation cases are missed, or are missed in some program execution branches). In fact, defining data validation orthogonally to program flow has a number of very great advantages in terms of time spent debugging, etc. Although it is not possible currently to do all data validation in the db using only relational constraints, a little time spent there is well worth it. MySQL does not allow for strict validation which cannot be disabled. PostgreSQL does.
In fact, RDBMS's are basically big math engines. A few other open source ones to take a look at are Firebird (has a few odd issues with NULLs that I find scary), Ingress II (a distant cousin to PostgreSQL), and Derby. The three big proprietary RDBMS's are MS SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle.
A few areas of PostgreSQL that are especially powerful are: 1) Stored procedures in multiple languages (Perl, PHP, Java, R, TCL, SQL with or without procedural extensions) 2) Table inheritance which can be useful in partitioning large tables (but can also be abused). 3) User defined types, and a very large number of built in types (for example CIDR and MAC address types) 4) The PostGIS add-on for geographic information systems.
I will be happy to send you chapters for review as they are completed. If you have time to respond great. If not, that is OK too.
Ok, I will admit to be a bit confrontational/argumentative in the parent post. The major motivation is to try to get some idea for how well you understand transactions after reading the book, i.e. if there is a conscious choice here involved, or just a rule that all writes should occur inside transactions (which they do anyway). I am not being malicious but sometimes people are better able to show their knowledge in a confrontational environment.
BTW, I guess the question I would have for you is where you want to take your db knowledge. Assuming you want to do db design, and are familiar with application development, I would suggest getting some good books in that area first, or at least get on appropriate email lists where you can challenge your knowledge and expand upon it. If you don't learn well from books, I would suggest either getting some sort of on-line training or finding on-line forums where you can get some support in developing these skills.
Also, I am going to suggest that you take some time, to the extent that you can, and learn PostgreSQL. MySQL has a lot of pitfalls once you start to do serious work on it (the planner doesn't handle large numbers of joins well, which limits normalization of some databases, and there are a number of other issues I can point to). PostgreSQL is a very good RDBMS, and it is far more programmable than MySQL.
Long-run I hope that the industry can move away from the emphasis on having programmers code SQL. This trend is responsible for a heck of a lot of problems in the industry. I have seen db structures which are so bad that they defy belief even for beginners (an event booking system which had one *table* per customer to store attendance). Hence my large gripe has to do with people starting to design databases before knowing anything about what they are doing. This again isn't your fault so much as it is an issue with most beginning SQL literature at the moment.
Finally I am working on creating a book on PostgreSQL which you might find interesting. It will assume some SQL knowledge, but if you are interested in providing some feedback on what is accessible and what is not, I would be happy to forward you a copy of each chapter as I get it done.
SQL-Ledger used the brilliant process of fetching (sometimes thousands) of rows from the db in order to generate aggregates in Perl, in the CGI app....
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I don't know. When you are struggling with and nearly holding your own against three cops, I am hard pressed to criticizing them for tasing him the first time. At some point you have to consider that there is a possibility of serious bodily harm to the officers whether or not the suspect is armed.
But the second time is needless and senseless.
Disagree. Give me a choice of a standard 9mm handgun or a taser when being charged by someone with a knife and I would choose the taser. The issue is that the jolt of electricity is far more likely to stop the charge than a bullet is. Remember that the Moros used to charge US marines in the Phillipines and even after taking mortal wounds from the guns of the day, would still often kill US soldiers with their spiked clubs. If you are choosing the gun, you have to be prepared to use it as a hand-to-hand weapon, not just shoot someone with it.
any less of a form of torture than tasers?
I think you are getting at my immediate reaction, which is that use of a taser may or may not constitute torture based upon the general context of the situation.
Are there cases where it is torture? I would bet good money that there are. After all, electric shock is a common instrument of torture around the world.
Are there cases where it is not? Yes, absolutely. I would be hard pressed to call the use of tasers when faced with deadly force (an assailant charging with a knife, for example) torture (and in these cases, it may be safer for the police than a gun (most guns are not guaranteed to stop the charge, but the electrical jolt of a taser will).
The Beslan children may have been killed by the Russian special forces, who also appear to have interfered with mediation efforts (poisoning of Politkovskaya). Yes, one can say it was indirectly by the terrorists, but this does not absolve the Russian military of their responsibility in the matter. With the death of Politkovskaya (after she has started publicly voicing her allegations), Litvinenko (killed by Polonium from a Russian nuclear reactor while investigating Politkovskaya's murder), and others, it looks like this was sufficiently worth silencing to kill dissidents both at home and abroad.
The Kursk issue had to do with how the rescue and recovery was handled rather than the accident itself. At the time, many Russians opposed Putin's handling of the accident.
Personally I would hope you would give the Union of Socialist Democrats a chance. Their leader has done well in the past to the extent that he was awarded a Nobel Prize, and would do well again.
I think the problem is a little more subtle than that.
...
In the US, Republicans get elected by voting their party's call. THis is why John McCain can never get elected (he can't win the primaries. He could win the general election, however.) Sort of like two British satirists wrote in the 19th century:
"I grew so rich that I was sent
By pocket borough into Parliament
I always voted my party's call
And I never thought of thinking
For myself at all
I thought so little they rewarded me
By making me the ruler of the Queen's Navy"
The Democrats have a less unified position but the coalition of issues ends up forcing consistency on the part of their nominees as well. Consequently we are stuck with two dominant ideologies which cannot allow for other views or voices. THis is further enforced by the rules of the electoral college which more or less preclude more than two viable parties from putting candidates up for election (because if no candidate gets more than 50% of the electoral votes, it goes to the house of representatives, which will almost certainly vote along party lines).
Additionally we have a problem in the US, as you do in Russia, where the intelligence and military organizations run a lot of the international politics from behind the scenes. This is a common problem internationally.... Putin on his record could have gone two ways (either extending the reign of the military and intelligence organizations or reining them in. He chose the former-- a good example of what might have been is found in Indonesia's president who has reined these in despite having a background similar to Putin). So there is often an appearance of dictatorship here, but it has not yet come to the point of generally infringing on individual liberty (it does threaten to, however).
Personally I am a big fan of the Union of Socialist Democrats :-) Russia would be better off having their Nobel laureate leader in office than with Putin :-).
Putin is only popular because of the manipulation of the press. Otherwise, incidents like the Kursk and reasonable rational inqueries into who really killed the kids in Beslan would have destroyed him long ago.
I think there are a couple points which need to be understood regarding Iraq, etc.
First, the occupation is a part of an imperialist concern over security (not control) of oil supplies which has been a major issue since WWII. Remember that the decisive defeat of the Japanese Navy during WWII was decisive because it cut off Japan's access to (you guessed it) oil. Both economically and militarily, we are dependent on oil for everything from jet fuel (though now liquified coal can be used) to fuel for most ground vehicles and manufacturing operations.
Hence there is a psychological if not military need for the US to keep troops in the Persian Gulf area. If not in Saudi Arabia, then in Iraq. The initial strategy wrt Iraq did involve the struggle against Al Qaeda. Knowing that the troops in Saudi Arabia give the Salafist wing of Al Qaeda (including bin Ladin) ample fuel for their propaganda, and knowing that Saddam was the target of the Qutbist wing (including Zawahiri), the goal was to get rid of both these propaganda targets and thus weaken the political support of Al Qaeda throughout the Middle East. I, and many others, said at the time that this was going to backfire and it did (it is now a better recruiting tool for Al Qaeda than either Saddam nor the troops in Saudi Arabia were).
The basic issue is that wars of occupation are not won through military strength. They are won instead through careful planning of the reconstruction and a genuine ability to bring a better, more stable state than either the previous government or any alternative (the second prerequisite is that one must also be credible). This is where we should be focusing the majority of our military effort and we are unwilling to do so. This means that, especially in light of the complaints against Blackwater their contracts ought to be suspended (and the Iraqi government needs to persue ever legal option against them including suing them in US courts, since according to various administrative regulations those courts alone have jurisdiction. The second area which needs to be done is amending the Iraqi Constitution to grant the Iraqi courts have jurisdiction regardless of US-written administrative regulations). We also need to take a hard line with the Iraqi government and state that if any department is allowed to use militias in any official or unofficial capacity, we will withdraw our protection, and that we will be happy to leave if asked.
BTW, reliance on mercinaries is always bad business in these sorts of things. Those mercenaries have an interest in keeping the conflict going.
Finally, we should announce that we are going to be involved until a stable and representative Iraqi government exists, but that we are happy to start the process over as often as necessary to make it happen.
I am going to disagree with the GP about the Iraqi Army. The fact is that despite its problems, it is the one organization in Iraq which seems to be helping to unify the country.
There is no longer any influence that can challenge Putin. I wish that the Union of Social Democrats could do so (I think that they represent the best attempt at creating a uniquely Russian republic), but I also think that things are impossible to change. In fact the current leader of the USD helped to roll back Putin's authoritarianism for a while early in his rule. However, with state control over the media, and the distraction of Chechnya, it seems difficult to see this happen.
BTW, one of the real eye-openers for me was when I read "Perestroika" by Gorbachev. I highly recommend reading it to get a very different point of view regarding governance during the Soviet days. I think that it also helps to clarify where Russia is at the moment.
Are you saying that his tampering with the elections is unnecessary (i.e. preventing contributions to opponents, rigging the news, and outright assassinating some opponents)?
;-)
Are you saying that it is unnecessary to ammend the Constitution to give him direct control over the appointment of various officials previously elected, that he would get his way anyway?
Of course, aside from the assassinations, state-run media, and over-all subtle politics of opposition, Saddam probably didn't rig the elections directly and probably seemed in many ways to tamper with them even less than Putin
Of course he expected fallout. However, on the balance, they accomplished a goal-- to silence criticism of what is/what was going on in Russia. Sure as an American, I may find it scary that Lugovoy is being treated as a hero in the Litvinenko assassination, but then I suppose we have Ollie North....
The main point, however, is that I would be very concerned about talking with Russian emigrants about their experience under Putin. I would be afraid I might put their lives at risk. That, I think was the point.
Before you go too far idolizing Putin, remember the Kursk.
Again, there is a tradeoff in moving towards dictatorship that the Russian people have to decide. It is not my decision, but when this starts to undermine the safety of people who are under the protection of other governments, I draw the line.
From Interfax.ru: "Kasparov and several other people have been delivered to the Meshchansky Court, but so far it is not clear what charges they are facing as a lawyer is not being allowed inside," Prokhorov told journalists.
I am not so sure about this. Kasparov's "fear-mongering" about the end of democracy in Russia seem more fact based than one might otherwise think.
Look, I am not saying that Russia doesn't have the right to choose a system which trades central control over infrastructure development and management of the country instead of one which safeguards individual liberty. This is a choice for Russians alone and I don't think we should interfere with that part itself. However, when Putin starts assassinating dissidents outside of Russia, then he crosses a line which makes him pretty clearly a problem everyone in the world has to face. We *should* have done this when Litvinenko was assassinated with polonium from a Russian nuclear reactor. Maybe this will help people start to realize the danger that Putin poses outside Russia.
Sure we can. We could make a strategic decision to purchase oil from Iran and embargo Russia ;-) We could and probably should add Russia to the list of state sponsors of terrorism (I started arguing this after Litvinenko's assassination). And we could start working with China to isolate Russia economically. Quite frankly if Putin wants to terrorize Russian dissidents inside Russia, that is a problem that the Russian people need to take responsibility for evaluating, but when he is ordering assassination of dissidents in other countries, then that crosses a line which we must not allow to be crossed.
However, your criticisms of democracy are fair criticisms. In reality, democracy's only redeeming value is that it is one additional protection of the people against the harms of arbitrary government. In cases where dictators are reasonably well-intentioned and mostly focused with getting the right things done (like Malaysia) they work quite a bit better on all levels than disfunctional democracies (Malaysia has a better human and possibly even civil rights record than Indonesia which is democratic). I think that there are two human rights which must be respected above all others: the right to collective self-determinism and the right to equal treatment before the laws. While Putin is arguably infringing on the latter, only when he crosses the line to order assassinations elsewhere does he move into areas which make this problem our responsibility.
However, your post is obviously either a troll or a flamebait. In order to help avoid future flames, I am going to try to answer some of your posts.
BTW, I am not a Muslim or a Christian. The main god I follow is one who represents human capacity and potential, and his name is Odin.
When it's about
-> violence in muslim holy texts and the violent life of the paedophile prophet
The Bible is not without violence or pedophilia?
;-). Why this double standard? We should discuss issues for what they are rather than coming up with new ways to pick fights, for those will ultimately be turned back on one's own culture.
Note also that if we are looking at things from a modern perspective, Jesus's father (i.e. God if you are a Christian) would have been a pedophile since Mary would have been only 12-13 when conceiving Christ
However you are also correct that Islam is not nor ever has been a religion of peace, except in the sense that there would be peace if everyone followed the same interpretation of Islamic law. Islam is indeed a religion of law, where social prescriptions are at the center of the religion. Any concept of a separation of mosque and state is foreign to Islam (although this is arguably the case with the separation of church and state in Christianity, there is no possible argument for such separation possible within an Islamic framework). So personally I do believe that Islam is inherently in conflict with our current ideas of religious freedom and the separation of temporal and sacred authority.
-> the relation (that indeed exists) between violence on tv/video games and violence in real life
I am not sure that we know what that relationship is. With violent crime rates at much lower rates than they were, say, 50 years ago, it is hard to make that comparison.
-> anything related to bush
Bush pronounced Putin's soul excellent, and has endeavored to cheat our legal system in ways which are frighteningly similar to what Putin has done. However, the difference is one of a great degree quantitatively, but not one qualitatively.
For example, seizing Mr Padilla, holding him without the right to Habeas Corpus guaranteed in our Constitution in such a way that Congress only can temporarily suspend (Habeas being the single greatest guardian of our liberty). Then, when the Supreme Court is set to rule on the case, they not only transfer him to civilian custody to avoid such a ruling but ask the 4th Circuit to vacate their current ruling so they can draw out the next case longer! If we didn't have our Constitution, there is no doubt in my mind that Putin and Bush would be no different.
-> discussion of the fact that abortion does indeed kill a human being and is thus not a laughing matter
I would not classify that as a statement of fact, but rather a statement of philosophy. Regardless of that, I don't think even many supporters of abortion rights see abortion as "a laughing matter."
-> science that contradicts global warming (it exists, and like everything in science, the true answer is "we don't know"), or even the science that states that a 6 degree rise in temperature will generate exactly 0 "extra disasters"
Of course, provided that rising sea levels from the melting of the antarctic ice caps, which then would flood a large part of Florida would not count as an "extra disaster..."
The fact is that we don't know what global warming will really bring. All our computer models are vastly oversimplified versions of the real world and hence they could all be wrong. For example However, we do know that the polar ice caps are melting (this is a matter of observation and not modelling) and that this does threaten to cause sea levels to rise. And that a large n
I would add that we saw the same thing with Fujomori in Peru-- a man who managed to bring an end to the horribly bloody civil war and then decided to stay in power after his term.
I am watching Ecuador's Correa but at the moment I think he is acting to preserve rather than undermine democracy. He has gone into things thus far with appropriate checks and balances, but we will see if that changes.
However, I see Putin as a very dangerous man in world politics. Under him, Russia might internally have some semblance of a rule of law (even if it is only a facade over a government of men), but domestically and internationally, Russia has become a state sponsor of terrorism. Everything that anyone ever accused Saddam of doing, Putin has done. But Putin is a better politician than Saddam, and Russia, like Saudi Arabia, has sufficient oil reserves to buy favor with Washington.
And another dissident investigating her death is poisoned with Polonium...
But Politkovskaya was no mere political dissident. She had been prevented from mediating an end to the standoff in Beslan but was poisoned on her way there. This lead her to accuse Putin of direct involvement in the school massacre. Soon after this, she is shot dead. Litvinenko, on investigating her death, is then poisoned with Polonium from a Russian nuclear reactor.
Even if Politkovskaya's allegations of Putin's involvement in the Beslan massacre turn out to be inaccurate, the subsequent assassination of both her and Litvinenko can only be called state sponsor of terrorism.
Look at the Litvenenko case. The assassination was designed to be clearly traceable to Russia (since you can fingerprint artificial isotopes to show what reactors they come from), and could not have been done without state help. Russia denies this, and this represents an assassination of a dissident emigrant specifically to warn other emigrants not to speak out against Putin. This is violence for the sole purpose of invoking terror, and it is arguably a greater threat to our way of life than Al Qaeda ever has been.
Fox News itself might be illegal, but all news has to be like Fox News, but from a pro-Putin rather than a Pro-Bush angle. Same sort of propaganda, but with a different target.
I would add that Iran is clearly far more democratic than Russia is today. Russia is more like Iraq under Saddam, where elections occur but nobody has any possibility of being elected except Putin. Despite meddling in the elections by the Council of Guardians, there are actual and real political dynamics which exist in Iran today. No such real dynamics occur under Russia today.
The big difference is that, unlike Saddam, Putin actually does have weapons of mass destruction.
And quotas about percentages of stories which must be favorable to Putin. Last I heard, no less than 50% of stories had to be favorable to Putin.
To be honest, most applications behind small public web sites have needs for databases so simple that they are reasonable areas for beginners. My first real attempt at db design was for a CRM program which was not terribly well done. I made lots of stupid mistakes which more or less doomed the project. Most of these were due in part to a lack of understanding relating to the function of the RDBMS and also a lack of understanding the semantics of the data I was working with. The first would have been solved by reading more, but the second was a matter of inexperience (not really understanding where functional dependencies were, which makes normalization impossible anyway).
As for PostgreSQL vs MySQL, MySQL was really built for light-weight content management applications. It does these things admirably but doesn't really allow you to use an RDBMS to its real potential. Hence it is a good choice for some applications. However, for line of business tools, or wherever money is tracked in the db, you can run into problems. (Strict mode can be turned off by applications, an a lot of checks don't work if the table was accidently created as MyISAM.)
You need to understand that an RDBMS can be used to mathematically define valid data for the application. These constraints can be used to avoid whole classes of bugs in application code (where subtle data validation cases are missed, or are missed in some program execution branches). In fact, defining data validation orthogonally to program flow has a number of very great advantages in terms of time spent debugging, etc. Although it is not possible currently to do all data validation in the db using only relational constraints, a little time spent there is well worth it. MySQL does not allow for strict validation which cannot be disabled. PostgreSQL does.
In fact, RDBMS's are basically big math engines. A few other open source ones to take a look at are Firebird (has a few odd issues with NULLs that I find scary), Ingress II (a distant cousin to PostgreSQL), and Derby. The three big proprietary RDBMS's are MS SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle.
A few areas of PostgreSQL that are especially powerful are:
1) Stored procedures in multiple languages (Perl, PHP, Java, R, TCL, SQL with or without procedural extensions)
2) Table inheritance which can be useful in partitioning large tables (but can also be abused).
3) User defined types, and a very large number of built in types (for example CIDR and MAC address types)
4) The PostGIS add-on for geographic information systems.
I will be happy to send you chapters for review as they are completed. If you have time to respond great. If not, that is OK too.
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Ok, I will admit to be a bit confrontational/argumentative in the parent post. The major motivation is to try to get some idea for how well you understand transactions after reading the book, i.e. if there is a conscious choice here involved, or just a rule that all writes should occur inside transactions (which they do anyway). I am not being malicious but sometimes people are better able to show their knowledge in a confrontational environment.
BTW, I guess the question I would have for you is where you want to take your db knowledge. Assuming you want to do db design, and are familiar with application development, I would suggest getting some good books in that area first, or at least get on appropriate email lists where you can challenge your knowledge and expand upon it. If you don't learn well from books, I would suggest either getting some sort of on-line training or finding on-line forums where you can get some support in developing these skills.
Also, I am going to suggest that you take some time, to the extent that you can, and learn PostgreSQL. MySQL has a lot of pitfalls once you start to do serious work on it (the planner doesn't handle large numbers of joins well, which limits normalization of some databases, and there are a number of other issues I can point to). PostgreSQL is a very good RDBMS, and it is far more programmable than MySQL.
Long-run I hope that the industry can move away from the emphasis on having programmers code SQL. This trend is responsible for a heck of a lot of problems in the industry. I have seen db structures which are so bad that they defy belief even for beginners (an event booking system which had one *table* per customer to store attendance). Hence my large gripe has to do with people starting to design databases before knowing anything about what they are doing. This again isn't your fault so much as it is an issue with most beginning SQL literature at the moment.
Finally I am working on creating a book on PostgreSQL which you might find interesting. It will assume some SQL knowledge, but if you are interested in providing some feedback on what is accessible and what is not, I would be happy to forward you a copy of each chapter as I get it done.
There is a parse error here. Maybe he meant:
who || 's photo' || s
Or maybe something else....
Never forget your concatenation operators....
SQL-Ledger used the brilliant process of fetching (sometimes thousands) of rows from the db in order to generate aggregates in Perl, in the CGI app....