Not, allegedly, if you're combat-trained. Not having a gun handy isn't considered an excuse.
Ok, so by your logic, you can hold up a military base shooting as an example of that fact that weapons aren't going to save you, but when its brought to light that the victims in that shooting didn't have access to any weapons then that's "no excuse"?
Boy if that isn't taking the "magic military" complex to a whole new level.
Not every weapon is a gun. Having a gun doesn't make you bulletproof. If the other guy has a gun and I have a knife, it makes my job harder. And if the other guy has a gun and all I have a stapler or can full of soda, it's harder still. But the most dangerous weapon of all isn't what's in you hands. It's what's in your head.
One of the worst shooting incidents in recent times came on an army base.
You do realize that on a state-side base (such as Ft Hood that you're referring to) almost none of the soldiers inside are allowed to carry loaded weapons right? The fact that they're wearing camo and have Jeeps sitting outside means zilch if you're still force to walk around unarmed
Not, allegedly, if you're combat-trained. Not having a gun handy isn't considered an excuse.
Yes, I know. A lot of military personnel are pencil-pushers and not combat-ready in any way shape or form. But I'd still lay odds that you'd find more guns and training on a randomly-selected corner of a military base than on a random street corner. Or at least more military training, depending on the street corner. But when all was said and done, the outcome wasn't really any better than it would be in a civilian office.
Maybe when you know that everyone has a submachine gun in their closet at home, people are less likely to use guns as threats. Of course they likely don't have a huge culture that revolves around guns without necessarily the responsibility that comes with it.
Somehow I don't think that this particular person was worrying about what people had at home.
Actually everyone should carry a portable ICBM targeting system, with nuclear warheads. After all someone could attack you from an armoured vehicle, hold your family hostage, or all sorts of other things if you only have a gun.
Indeed. Our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear thermonuclear weapons should not be infringed.
Umm... Would the name calling gentleman be so kind as to explain, why incidents like this are very rare in countries which do not provide ready access to guns to the general public?
Ah, my good ol' friend correlation does not imply causality. Now, rather than explain anything I'll simply point out that number 4 on the list of gun ownership/capita is Switzerland where incidents like this are rare. So perhaps you would be so kind as to explain why you jump to such glib conclusions as to the cause of this incident.
Well, I could be wrong, but I think that gun ownership in Switzerland is practically mandatory due to military service requirements. On the other hand, I hadn't heard that they run around the streets packing heat like in the USA.
Just like and armed churchgoer stopped this attack
It wasn't an "armed churchgoer" as you misleadingly state. It was an off-duty police officer, trained in the use of lethal force.
When you start with untrained use of lethal force you get George Zimmerman shooting at Trayvon Martin.
One of the worst shooting incidents in recent times came on an army base. And I see to recall that a certain politician in Arizona was surrounded by gun-carrying people, for all the good it did her and the other victims around her.
If you want to feel good, get a lollipop. All the weapons in the world aren't going to help if you don't have the wits to use them. Conversely, anything in the world can be a weapon if you do.
The problem with Godwin's Law is that it isn't a "law", it's a blunt object wielded more often than not as a knee-jerk response. And one of the things I'm explicitly warning against it knee-jerk responses. Knowing the facts is important. Using your brains instead of some fat Big Brother's who just happens to have a popular radio show is even more so. And I'm not singling out the Right over the Left. The very idea that everything can be neatly parcelled out into Right and Left is a large part of the problem.
Sometimes the Nazi analogy is indeed overblown, but sometimes it's spot on.
Exactly what progress have they made in the office application field that justifies this argument?
From what I can tell, something wonderful must have been going on in Excel.
But I don't know, since I'm not an Excel geek. When it comes to word processing, I do complex technical documents and the only improvement that was made since Office 97 that I found useful was that they got rid of Clippy.
"Tech writer (and programmer) Jeff Cogswell examines both sides from a programming perspective."
Irrelevant. The data exists to serve the needs of the business and programmers/developers work to serve those needs. The company should chose the best tool for the job which is a usually a relational database as it serve the needs of the "business" the best in most cases. If you are looking to see which is easier for you then you are a shitty programmer and you need to upgrade your skills to understand how to work with relational databases. You should not be dictating what storage methodology is used for the data.
To be a competent developer, you need to have some understanding of how databases work because you cannot rely on the DBA to babysit all of the projects. You should understand what indexes are, the difference between and inner and outer join and when you can use each time and you should test your code against a large data set to find any bottlenecks on the database side.
Don't confuse the database with the data. Although normalized data is the ideal, practical needs require alternative solutions, and that may even include placing copies of some data in nosql data stores. Although one thing I learned from IBM's bad examples is that if you must keep multiple copies of data, there had better bygolly be one definitive one and it had better be kept as up-to-date as possible.
As far was "what's easiest for the programmer" goes, sneer all you want, but it's the corporation that demands faster-cheaper, and if that means that the programmer raps out something with bigtable instead of a meticulously-tuned SQL, argue with the corporation, not the programmer.
I have to laugh at the 2nd Amendment NRA types bristling with their automatic weapons and camoflage gear. Ever tried taking the 2nd Amendment into an airport?
Even a "well-regulated" militia doesn't stand a chance against a determined Federal government armed with nuclear warheads and drones. So cut the pep rallies and let's look for something realistic. Violence isn't going to do it.
I can sympathise with the need to keep secrets. Not all processes work well when done totally in the open. On the other hand, secrecy is one of the greatest defenses of tyrants. Secrecy should be a last resort, not the first. So pardon me if I cannot totally condemn WikiLeaks. Roaches flee from the light. Even Gutenberg supposedly considered the dangers of spreading information too freely, but decided that the benefits outweighed the costs.
Sounds exactly like the conditions that people lived in under the rule of the Nazis and Communists.
Nope. Anyone who uses that argument doesn't actually study history. Christians used it when they took prayer out of school, did you know that (search for 26 similarities between America and Nazi Germany)?
Really, how many of you have been stopped at government checkpoints and asked to show your papers (except when leaving the country)? Further, if you failed to supply papers, were you under threat of arrest? How many of you have had your entire families deported or locked-up because of their religions or their views of the government? Can I call the feds and report my neighbor for being a collaborator if I want his house?
Stop feeding the panic and start fucking thinking.
Bad hyperbole = bad argument.
I hate to use the words "slippery slope", but Nazi Germany didn't just spring up overnight.
When I was young, you could apply for a job without having to "show your papers" or prove that you weren't guilty of being a drug addict. We gave away the presumption of innocence in the 1980s.
When I was young you could legally listen to any radio transmission you wanted to. Again, in the 1980s, that was changed to forbid monitoring cell-phone frequencies. Since then, almost all of the public service channels in my city, state and county are digitally encrypted from critical stake-outs and investigations all the way down to garbage collection and city buses. I learned a lot about how my city works from listening to the people I pay to keep it running. This year the city took the decrypting scanners away from the local newpaper and TV stations.
When I was young, the fortified fence was what Communist countries used and America's borders were famously open.
When I was young, US armed forces were supposedly "better" than Communist/Nazi forces because we treated prisoners fairly and didn't torture them. Torture, in fact, was unthinkable, even when faced with the very "agents of Satan" themselves.
Not everything was better back then. Especially if you were black, female or gay. But if the reality didn't always measure up, at least we had the ideals. Since 9/11, the ideals have been flushed down the toilet.
It may not be slippery - yet, but I'd definitely say it's a slope.
Exactly. NVidia hasn't done anything of note except produce good video cards and GPUs.
... And obscene gestures from Linus Torvards.
Well, and me, for that matter. Although I think the main video glitches I see have something to with Flash already having mucked things up to begin with.
Still, that's a "crime" that doesn't deserve quite that severe a punishment.
There will be no future archaeologists. How can they assume a huge cultural discontinuity that would require archaeology? The only reason we have any archaeology is because people didn't write anything down.
Funny, last time I looked, an awful lot of archeology was being done about places and times where people wrote a lot of things down. Like, for example, recent Roman discoveries.
The reason for archeology is that A) a lot of what's written is lies, hearsay, propaganda, misconceptions, exageration for entertainment purposes, etc. Or perhaps, you'd forgotten Atlantis?
And B) even the best records are perishable. Periodically we lose large quantities of vital statistics when a town hall or hospital burns down or gets nuked by a tornado.
Which is why they're looking at keeping "eternal" records on sapphire instead of on Post-it Notes. So that something useful will be found on the site of the former New York City.
Seems to be common pratics that sites store plaintext password this days, one would think the programmers knew better, is it in an attempt to try and speed optimize things, they leave out hashing ? Or is there a more sinister reason, someone twisting their arm around.
Any sytem that can't handle the overhead of a hash function is already on the edge of the abyss to begin with.
As for "sinister reasons", try "We get our programmers for Lower Prices Everyday[TM]".
I don't think anyone has seriously suggested that global warming will bring on an extinction-level event. But I would say that a few million drowned Bangladeshi counts as a "catastrophe."
Drowned? Really? So entire generations are going to just sit there while the water around them rises? I think they'll have time to, you know, move.
If I were you, I'd meditate on previous flood season headlines. Bangaldesh has a long history of people drowning. In fact, if there were an Olympic event for it...
As the level rises, the extremes increase. An inch of increase (depending on the topography of the shore) may result in a 6" extra surge -- once per 10 years.
Otherwise- I completely agree with you. People who build on the shore should expect to move.
Ah yes, the old joke about the statistician who drowned in a lake that averaged 2 inches deep.
Yes. "IT Doesn't Matter" (http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.html). The argument that IT is just another commodity that should be purchased as cheaply as possible.
Amusingly, General Motors has apparently now decided that IT matters after all (http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/285577/gm-set-move-away-it-outsourcing).
Slashdot Mirror
Not, allegedly, if you're combat-trained. Not having a gun handy isn't considered an excuse.
Ok, so by your logic, you can hold up a military base shooting as an example of that fact that weapons aren't going to save you, but when its brought to light that the victims in that shooting didn't have access to any weapons then that's "no excuse"?
Boy if that isn't taking the "magic military" complex to a whole new level.
Not every weapon is a gun. Having a gun doesn't make you bulletproof. If the other guy has a gun and I have a knife, it makes my job harder. And if the other guy has a gun and all I have a stapler or can full of soda, it's harder still. But the most dangerous weapon of all isn't what's in you hands. It's what's in your head.
One of the worst shooting incidents in recent times came on an army base.
You do realize that on a state-side base (such as Ft Hood that you're referring to) almost none of the soldiers inside are allowed to carry loaded weapons right? The fact that they're wearing camo and have Jeeps sitting outside means zilch if you're still force to walk around unarmed
Not, allegedly, if you're combat-trained. Not having a gun handy isn't considered an excuse.
Yes, I know. A lot of military personnel are pencil-pushers and not combat-ready in any way shape or form. But I'd still lay odds that you'd find more guns and training on a randomly-selected corner of a military base than on a random street corner. Or at least more military training, depending on the street corner. But when all was said and done, the outcome wasn't really any better than it would be in a civilian office.
Scanners at theaters won't help; the gunman today kicked in one of the emergency exit doors from the outside.
Hey! This is the Twenty-First Century. Weld them suckers shut. Got to keep everyone SAFE!
Maybe when you know that everyone has a submachine gun in their closet at home, people are less likely to use guns as threats. Of course they likely don't have a huge culture that revolves around guns without necessarily the responsibility that comes with it.
Somehow I don't think that this particular person was worrying about what people had at home.
Actually everyone should carry a portable ICBM targeting system, with nuclear warheads. After all someone could attack you from an armoured vehicle, hold your family hostage, or all sorts of other things if you only have a gun.
Indeed. Our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear thermonuclear weapons should not be infringed.
Umm... Would the name calling gentleman be so kind as to explain, why incidents like this are very rare in countries which do not provide ready access to guns to the general public?
Ah, my good ol' friend correlation does not imply causality. Now, rather than explain anything I'll simply point out that number 4 on the list of gun ownership/capita is Switzerland where incidents like this are rare. So perhaps you would be so kind as to explain why you jump to such glib conclusions as to the cause of this incident.
Well, I could be wrong, but I think that gun ownership in Switzerland is practically mandatory due to military service requirements. On the other hand, I hadn't heard that they run around the streets packing heat like in the USA.
Just like and armed churchgoer stopped this attack
It wasn't an "armed churchgoer" as you misleadingly state. It was an off-duty police officer, trained in the use of lethal force.
When you start with untrained use of lethal force you get George Zimmerman shooting at Trayvon Martin.
One of the worst shooting incidents in recent times came on an army base. And I see to recall that a certain politician in Arizona was surrounded by gun-carrying people, for all the good it did her and the other victims around her.
If you want to feel good, get a lollipop. All the weapons in the world aren't going to help if you don't have the wits to use them. Conversely, anything in the world can be a weapon if you do.
Better the Anglicans than the Grammar Scientologists.
How many people do you know that have died from Terrorists?
So what you're saying is that the counter-terrorism measures are working.
As opposed to the "anti-psychopath-with-guns-and-bombs" measures?
More people got killed/injured in Denver today by a presumed US citizen than were killed all last year by foreign terrorists.
So I guess it's time to set up porno-scanners at the movie theatres.
Meh. I liked Crystal Pepsi. The caramel coloring in colas is purely for looks, and it curdles in you mouth.
But unless Unity supports desktop applets and user program launchers, I'm not going near it. Of all the insanely stupid things Gnome3 did...
The problem with Godwin's Law is that it isn't a "law", it's a blunt object wielded more often than not as a knee-jerk response. And one of the things I'm explicitly warning against it knee-jerk responses. Knowing the facts is important. Using your brains instead of some fat Big Brother's who just happens to have a popular radio show is even more so. And I'm not singling out the Right over the Left. The very idea that everything can be neatly parcelled out into Right and Left is a large part of the problem.
Sometimes the Nazi analogy is indeed overblown, but sometimes it's spot on.
Exactly what progress have they made in the office application field that justifies this argument?
From what I can tell, something wonderful must have been going on in Excel.
But I don't know, since I'm not an Excel geek. When it comes to word processing, I do complex technical documents and the only improvement that was made since Office 97 that I found useful was that they got rid of Clippy.
They need the extra thickness for the patent licenses.
They should look at how Apple insulates, then.
Oh wait, Apple patented that.
Old software has bits that rust. They oxidize into AOL subscriptions. You don't want that.
Yah. "If it aint' broke, don't fix it" doesn't apply to computers. Too often it gets broken for you.
"Tech writer (and programmer) Jeff Cogswell examines both sides from a programming perspective."
Irrelevant. The data exists to serve the needs of the business and programmers/developers work to serve those needs. The company should chose the best tool for the job which is a usually a relational database as it serve the needs of the "business" the best in most cases. If you are looking to see which is easier for you then you are a shitty programmer and you need to upgrade your skills to understand how to work with relational databases. You should not be dictating what storage methodology is used for the data.
To be a competent developer, you need to have some understanding of how databases work because you cannot rely on the DBA to babysit all of the projects. You should understand what indexes are, the difference between and inner and outer join and when you can use each time and you should test your code against a large data set to find any bottlenecks on the database side.
Don't confuse the database with the data. Although normalized data is the ideal, practical needs require alternative solutions, and that may even include placing copies of some data in nosql data stores. Although one thing I learned from IBM's bad examples is that if you must keep multiple copies of data, there had better bygolly be one definitive one and it had better be kept as up-to-date as possible.
As far was "what's easiest for the programmer" goes, sneer all you want, but it's the corporation that demands faster-cheaper, and if that means that the programmer raps out something with bigtable instead of a meticulously-tuned SQL, argue with the corporation, not the programmer.
I have to laugh at the 2nd Amendment NRA types bristling with their automatic weapons and camoflage gear. Ever tried taking the 2nd Amendment into an airport?
Even a "well-regulated" militia doesn't stand a chance against a determined Federal government armed with nuclear warheads and drones. So cut the pep rallies and let's look for something realistic. Violence isn't going to do it.
I can sympathise with the need to keep secrets. Not all processes work well when done totally in the open. On the other hand, secrecy is one of the greatest defenses of tyrants. Secrecy should be a last resort, not the first. So pardon me if I cannot totally condemn WikiLeaks. Roaches flee from the light. Even Gutenberg supposedly considered the dangers of spreading information too freely, but decided that the benefits outweighed the costs.
Sounds exactly like the conditions that people lived in under the rule of the Nazis and Communists.
Nope. Anyone who uses that argument doesn't actually study history. Christians used it when they took prayer out of school, did you know that (search for 26 similarities between America and Nazi Germany)?
Really, how many of you have been stopped at government checkpoints and asked to show your papers (except when leaving the country)? Further, if you failed to supply papers, were you under threat of arrest? How many of you have had your entire families deported or locked-up because of their religions or their views of the government? Can I call the feds and report my neighbor for being a collaborator if I want his house?
Stop feeding the panic and start fucking thinking.
Bad hyperbole = bad argument.
I hate to use the words "slippery slope", but Nazi Germany didn't just spring up overnight.
When I was young, you could apply for a job without having to "show your papers" or prove that you weren't guilty of being a drug addict. We gave away the presumption of innocence in the 1980s.
When I was young you could legally listen to any radio transmission you wanted to. Again, in the 1980s, that was changed to forbid monitoring cell-phone frequencies. Since then, almost all of the public service channels in my city, state and county are digitally encrypted from critical stake-outs and investigations all the way down to garbage collection and city buses. I learned a lot about how my city works from listening to the people I pay to keep it running. This year the city took the decrypting scanners away from the local newpaper and TV stations.
When I was young, the fortified fence was what Communist countries used and America's borders were famously open.
When I was young, US armed forces were supposedly "better" than Communist/Nazi forces because we treated prisoners fairly and didn't torture them. Torture, in fact, was unthinkable, even when faced with the very "agents of Satan" themselves.
Not everything was better back then. Especially if you were black, female or gay. But if the reality didn't always measure up, at least we had the ideals. Since 9/11, the ideals have been flushed down the toilet.
It may not be slippery - yet, but I'd definitely say it's a slope.
Exactly. NVidia hasn't done anything of note except produce good video cards and GPUs.
... And obscene gestures from Linus Torvards.
Well, and me, for that matter. Although I think the main video glitches I see have something to with Flash already having mucked things up to begin with.
Still, that's a "crime" that doesn't deserve quite that severe a punishment.
I took a look at their website. Seems like two ex-Gartners striking out on their own to build their own Gartner.
Dogbert & Ratbert?
There will be no future archaeologists. How can they assume a huge cultural discontinuity that would require archaeology?
The only reason we have any archaeology is because people didn't write anything down.
Funny, last time I looked, an awful lot of archeology was being done about places and times where people wrote a lot of things down. Like, for example, recent Roman discoveries.
The reason for archeology is that A) a lot of what's written is lies, hearsay, propaganda, misconceptions, exageration for entertainment purposes, etc. Or perhaps, you'd forgotten Atlantis?
And B) even the best records are perishable. Periodically we lose large quantities of vital statistics when a town hall or hospital burns down or gets nuked by a tornado.
Which is why they're looking at keeping "eternal" records on sapphire instead of on Post-it Notes. So that something useful will be found on the site of the former New York City.
Seems to be common pratics that sites store plaintext password this days, one would think the programmers knew better, is it in an attempt to try and speed optimize things, they leave out hashing ?
Or is there a more sinister reason, someone twisting their arm around.
Any sytem that can't handle the overhead of a hash function is already on the edge of the abyss to begin with.
As for "sinister reasons", try "We get our programmers for Lower Prices Everyday[TM]".
And the solution to capitalism is?
Realizing that capitalism is an economic system, not a religion
Infidel! Capitalism is the One True Faith. Bastion against teh ebil Socialisms! And the Holy Free Market is our one and only Savior.
I don't think anyone has seriously suggested that global warming will bring on an extinction-level event. But I would say that a few million drowned Bangladeshi counts as a "catastrophe."
Drowned? Really? So entire generations are going to just sit there while the water around them rises? I think they'll have time to, you know, move.
If I were you, I'd meditate on previous flood season headlines. Bangaldesh has a long history of people drowning. In fact, if there were an Olympic event for it...
It's not the average that matters.
As the level rises, the extremes increase. An inch of increase (depending on the topography of the shore) may result in a 6" extra surge -- once per 10 years.
Otherwise- I completely agree with you. People who build on the shore should expect to move.
Ah yes, the old joke about the statistician who drowned in a lake that averaged 2 inches deep.
Anybody ever hear anything else thats relevant?
Yes. "IT Doesn't Matter" (http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.html). The argument that IT is just another commodity that should be purchased as cheaply as possible.
Amusingly, General Motors has apparently now decided that IT matters after all (http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/285577/gm-set-move-away-it-outsourcing).