Well, you're both right - sort of. Adequate quality protein is simply not an issue for veggies, except perhaps with some of the really radical vegans who only eat non-root vegetable and nothing else. Most N. Americans eat too much protein - there is a well studied and strong linkage between excess protein and osteoporosis. Excess protein intake leaches calcium from bones. This is well-studied and well-documented (3 non-web references at the end here).
Plant protein is plenty good enough, provided one has a decently varied diet. It is not necessary to consume high quality (i.e. all essential amino acids) protein at one sitting. Spreading it out over a week or so is more than adequate, especially given the abundance of food in N. America.
On the other hand, many vegetarians have inadequate intake of vitamin B-12 and may suffer from out of balance homocystine levels. Thus some are at greater risk for heart attack than one might think. Most soy products, and many breakfast cereals now have added B-12; any type of dairy product also has high levels of B-12 (higher than meat products, in fact) and is a complete protein as well.
Re protein osteoporosis:
Zemel MB. Calcium utilization: effect of varying level and source of dietary protein. Am J Clin Nutr, 1988;48:880-3.
Hegsted DM. Calcium and osteoporosis. J Nutr, 1986;116:2316-2319.
Robertson PJ, et al. The effect of high animal protein intake on the risk of calcium stone-formation in the urinary tract. Clinical Science, 1979;57:285-288.
Note that those are fairly old references, but newer studies have simply shown the same thing even more conclusively.
As an aside, there is some evidence that athletes (i.e. Olympic-level, not weekend warrior types) may improve their strength slightly faster when they include some meat, preferably fish, in their diet.
Vitamins are not all equal. For example, vitamin C is well known as an anti-oxidant, and it is in fact, when gotten the usual way: veggies, fruits and (blech) liver.
But the artificially produced vitamin C is subtly different, and, in fact has measurable oxidizing and mutagenic effects (sorry, it's PDF. There are also newer and better studies if you search hard enough).
Similar results have been noted with artificial beta-carotene. The manufacturers are modifying the supplements now, but it gives an idea of how little we understand the nutrition processes.
Incidentally, artificial vitamin C first came under scrutiny in the mid-80's, when it was discovered that it did not prevent scurvy, but fruit-derived vitamin C did.
Lastly, it's pretty well known now that, while vitamins and minerals are very important, there are a lot of phytochemicals in the plant-based foods that are extremely important to health, and we only know what a fraction of them are. They can only load the supplements with what we already know about.
OK, that's certainly true enough. I apologize if I misinterpreted what you wrote. There's too many *@*#%ng DB morons out there (that I deal with daily), so I was probably too quick to be unfair to you.
"The crappy thing about current tech is that all record sets are 2 dimensional."
This statement indicates a profound ignorance of basic database design. The entire purpose of a relational database is to maintain n-dimensional structures! To put it crudely, each table describes one dimension, and a given database can therefore have as many dimensions as desired (within physical limits).
That's the reason why so many well-trained people spend their time babbling about normalization, first-, second-, third-normal form and so forth. Some people (I've worked with many) think that normalization is a fussy, over-theoretical waste of time, and start throwing out buzzwords, depending upon their age, such as "object-relational", "XML-database" and so forth.
"Right now postges sends a message to the application saying, this is locked retry transaction..."
That's pretty unlikely, given that Postgresql uses multiversion concurrency control - again, put crudely, two different instances, say one a read and one a write, are effectively not even looking at the same DB, but at two independent "virtual" copies of the "real" DB (yes, Postgresql people, I know that's not quite right. That's why I said "crude"). It's possible for a lock conflict to occur, but not likely. And there is a lock resolution mechanism, so it's even more unlikely that an error message will pop up.
Any omissions of brand names or vagueness is deliberate to protect the innocent:
A dot-bomb I was contracting for had ordered three racks, stuffed with the requisite servers, switches and so forth (mostly Compaq and Cisco stuff). The boss was great at programming, but not so bright when it came to physical items.
The populated racks arrived in town, at the vendor's local warehouse. They called and asked how it should be delivered. The boss insisted on talking to them, rather than letting the shipping/receiving guy deal with the new toys. Consequently the vendor was told, by the boss, that we had a loading dock at our building. We did not.
"But I thought a loading zone was the same as a loading dock." he later declared. Sorry Dean, they are different.
So the truck & racks arrived. Naturally, they'd sent a truck without a hydraulic/electric tailgate, and only one guy. Each rack was about 1100 lbs. The boss wanted to try unloading them then and there, but even he soon realized that that was not feasible. So they went back.
Several days passed, but the vendor had no suitable truck. After a lot of tantrums from the boss, they finally rented a truck with the necessary tailgate. It arrived at our building, and unloaded the racks and their pallets. Incidentally, everything was properly secured inside the truck both times.
Unfortunately, the boss (who had personally ordered the equipment, which was totally wrong for our needs, but that's another story) never checked dimensions. The racks were 1/2" taller than the elevator doors.
Impatient boss didn't want to remove the servers, etc., disassemble the racks and take the pieces upstairs. Rather, he insisted on getting everyone from the office, removing the pallets (after which the racks were still that 1/2" too tall) and trying to ram them through the doors. Dean sometimes had a hard time with concepts like "metal" and "concrete". Several bad dents and chips later, he gave up.
Next, Dean thought of the brilliant idea of tilting 1100 lb racks. On a tile floor. Even with everyone helping, once tilted, it started sliding uncontrollably and fell over with a massive boom.
Did this discourage him? Nope. He (with help) shoved the first one into the elevator, and somehow got it angled in there. When the doors closed, they scraped along the bottom corner of the rack, and the stainless steel took a nasty gouging.
Unfortunately, the elevator was rated for 800 lbs, not 1100lbs, certainly not 1100lbs with Dean and three helpers = almost 2000 lbs. Nothing dramatic, but the elevator safeties cut in and the elevator wouldn't budge.
Deans's solution? Use a screwdriver and force the fireman's override switch on, of course. I decided it was prudent to take lunch just then. When I got back, they'd gotten:
All three racks upstairs
Screamed at by the building manager for the cosmetic damage (the lobby floor got chipped up, the elevator doors, internal and external were badly marred, the hallway on our floor had some fresh holes in the walls and a damaged corner or two).
Everyone in the building was mad, as the elevator motor was smart enough to realize it was gettng overtaxed, and it shut down after the last rack. This left a 20-story building with only one elevator. At lunchtime.
When they finally made it into the server room, we discovered that, as one might suspect, a number of the units did not function, and had to be replaced. Sure enough, the boss tried to get it replaced on warranty, but I left not long after, so I don't know how things played out...
Well, if you believe the U.S. Attorney General, John Ashcroft, cats aren't natural anyway. At least not Calicos. They're tools of Satan or something (it's near the end of the article.)
So you're actually assisting in the battle against evil when you deal harshly with cats.
FWIW, my sister's cat has almost convinced me that Ashcroft is right.
Agreed. Jill H. was the best. FWIW, I just read in the paper a couple of days ago that Michael Moriarty lives in Vancouver, Canada. Short version, from memory, so there will be some inaccuracies:
He moved to Canada a few years ago. His alcoholism got out of control. In the meantime, he managed to legally immigrate. Then he sobered up, moved to (I think) Alberta, where he was going to run for parliament.
Somehow, that didn't work out. So he moved to Vancouver with his wife (?). He fell off the wagon again, got tossed in jail for domestic assault (he started screaming at her and slapped her in a restaurant).
She didn't press charges, but they're still thinking about prosecuting anyway. In the meantime, he's living in a trailer (or traileresque home, hard to tell from the newspaper picture). Apparently he doesn't do much but come into Vancouver to drink and fight. Some guys even beat him up a few weeks back, jumped him when he was leaving a bar. Put him in the hospital.
By most accounts, he's actually quite similar in personality to his character on Law & Order. He seems to have a lot of friends who will speak up/look out for him, so I suspect, as always, there's more to the story than what one reads in the paper.
They've got reasonably decent ways to contain a flywheel disintegration. Not perfect. After all, you are trying to contain a respectable fraction of the energy in a tank of gas!
Not to mention the amusing gyroscopic effects that a flywheel induces. Want to turn the corner? Well, you better hope your tires have enough traction to overcome the tendency of the flywheel to not want to go around the corner.
That's for vertically-mounted flywheels. If they're mounted flat, they do interesting things to the ride (and hence the handling) of the car, by virtue of the fact that the car needs to be able to pitch and roll somewhat in order to absorb bumps.
Yeah, there are various things that can be done, but boy is it a lot of work (=expensive)!
That's misleading. A modern Golf is a much larger car as well - I'm 6'4", and I absolutely did not fit in the 1981 version, but I'm decently comfortable in the modern version. It carries far more luggage. It's got a much more powerful (and bigger and heavier) engine. It's got a large number of luxury devices standard, that the spartan 1981 version didn't offer at all. And it's got a helluva lot more sound insulation and structural bracing which makes it a quiet car, whereas the1981 model was like driving in a tin can with pebbles rattling around.
Surely some of that contributed to the weight gain? No doubt safety features contributed weight as well, but note that road deaths in the U.S. have dropped from about 50,000 to about 40,000 annually. That's despite a larger population and more drivers. And I doubt it has much to do with drivers getting better...:)
Mortar shells cost a fair bit more than that, artillery shells still more. Particularly the newer ones. But there is a cheap way to overwhelm such a system.:)
"...would add so much overhead (with exactly zero benefits) that
only a marketing guy could take such a decision."
AHA! I think you've hit on the real problem here... God knows the marketroids at my company are constantly nagging everyone to use XML for everything, and often come back from a call saying something like "I told Client Z that we use XML for this, this, and that. We do, right?"
Yes. The BC Liberals are brilliant. So brilliant that my company has now lost our three senior (and good) programmers to companies in Washington and Oregon, and we can't find replacements (at rates we can afford, and we pay well). Back to that in a moment.
The Liberals didn't drop the rating system because they're fair-minded and principled. Rather, they view implementing it as an unnecessary nuisance of an expense. Their only moral standard is a "$", and if you take the time to observe, you'll note that they are mostly interested in the $ in their own pockets.
So, why are our coders leaving? Because they want their kids to have a good education, and they want to have health care they can count on. These guys won't get paid as well, but they've grown tired of seeing the "capitalist" U.S. fund public services in a sensible and adequate manner. A manner which is considerably more lavish than what "socialist" BC does. At the same time, they're seeing the Liberals, in a few short months, gutting what's left of the BC public services.
Washington and Oregon aren't Utopia, but they are stealing BC nurses, teachers and skilled workers by the thousands.
Amazing that no one in BC remembers what Gordon Campbell did when he was mayor of Vancouver. Oh well, as Mr. Churchill said, "people usually get exactly the kind of government they deserve"!
Nope. It's real. It's a nerve gas, developed by the Germans in the early 20th century, IIRC. It was used by a fanatical Japanese cult to gas a subway in Tokyo a few years ago. Killed approx. a dozen people, made another thousand or so quite ill. Some have never fully recovered. Its attraction is that it's relatively easy to manufacture.
Americans just tend to be more apprehensive than Europeans about governmental involvement in their lives. This is for historical and cultural reasons, I won't go into that here. But we fought a war of independence because we didn't like the government telling us what to do.:)
In the various forms which have so far been proposed, there is a requirement for centralized control, and collection and analysis of vast amounts of personal data which are unrelated to any security concerns. Thus, there is a strong suspicion that the motives for such a system are to make money from the data collected, rather than to improve security. Why the hell does Larry Ellison (Oracle) want my average income level?
"Oh, I'm sorry sir, we have to detain you, you only earned $29k last year, that fits the profile of a terrorist. So is the fact that you bought a Whopper Jr. last year and you haven't got any kids! Very suspicious behavior."
Police in the U.S. have a strong history of using centralized data in an abusive way, and people are suspicious of giving them even more and easier access to data. To be fair, most cops are pretty good, but some are not. I think people would be more comfortable if there were safeguards in place, but no one has proposed anything satisfactory yet.
Often the argument is put forth that "if you haven't done anything wrong, you haven't got anything to hide." No, an information database like that gives people in law enforcement an anoymous way to search for and harass people based on the officer's personal bias. This could be an FBI agent who doesn't like Methodists, or Joe Cop who doesn't like environmentalists. It's bad enough already, without making it too easy. My SO had a cop show up at her door and ask her for a date. He saw her driving, liked her looks, ran her license plate and got her address. He sawnothing wrong with that. When I objected, he pointed out he could "flag" her entry, and we would get stopped every time the license plate was run. Now imagine if lots of personal data were linked to this, and you get some idea of the problems that would have to be solved... just because he didn't like me, I could have problems no matter where I travelled. In this particular case, unfortunately for him, a friend of mine was his supervisor.:/
It is possible to come up with fairly decent systems that do *not* require a centralized database (this would, arguably, increase reliability). In fact, many companies have developed such systems. The "big boys" don't promote these, because the greatest profitibility lies in the data, not the security.
I think the idea (make it easier for law enforcement to track the bad guys) is perfectly valid, but the implementations which have been proposed are poor. They are always clumsy and burdensome, and would be perfect for tracking law-abiding citizens, and useless for tracking the Bad Guys. So vast resources would be wasted in harassing and tracking people of no interest.
P.S. Yes, we often use birth certificates. More often driver's licenses, since most everyone has them. But those are handled state by state, not by the federal government, and they're not mandatory (except to drive...).
The island you are referring to is Thera, also called Santorini. The idea that the eruption of Thera destroyed Minoan civilization has been around for about 30 years, so it's not exactly a recent idea. What we know is that there was a catastrophic eruption of Thera, an explosion that was approximately 1000x larger than Mt. St. Helens. There are geologic strata throughout the Eastern Mediterranean containing ash from that eruption. The ashfall even made it to Egypt, and there are believed to have been decent size tsunami that made it as far as Egypt (although not catastrophic waves, it seems).
Interesting. My brother works in a department of the Canadian Gov't, which shall also remain nameless, though it's quite mundane.
Security is pretty good. There is exactly one access point. (Alarms on the emergency exits, etc.). The guard is quite thorough. By now, he knows me, but he won't let me in. Someone who will vouch for me must physically come out and get me. Even then, I need a badge, and it only permits me access to the sections it's colour-coded to. I am told that people have been escorted out quickly when going into an area that doesn't match their badge. I'm also told that I get in relatively easily, since I'm a close relative.
Even though the guard knows the employees, he still has to check their badges on the way in, and he's not lax about it. When they had a substitute guard at one point, he *didn't* know me, and he was extremely suspicious, even after I was cleared.
Delivery people are simply not allowed in. They leave stuff in front of the guard kiosk, and someone comes down to fetch it. I'm sure there are ways to get through, but it's not bad.
I haven't been there since Sept. 11, so I don't know if they've tightened things at all. I do know that the next security level up requires people to use their access cards just to get to the guard kiosk (i.e. they lock the outside doors).
Oh, *that* detail! Yes, there would certainly be some problems with flex if you had a long enough lever arm... the elevator's probably more practical.:)
Not really. That's one of the (many) great advantages of a trebuchet over a catapult: the acceleration is *not* greatest at the beginning. It's reasonably constant throughout the action. That's why you can make a trebuchet shoot farther/faster than a catapult, without requiring heftier components.
I wouldn't be too sure that the guards will be understanding. When I was little, (in the 70's, when hijacking was also a big problem) I and my family accompanied my uncle to the airport to see him off. He was taking an electronics package from the federal agency (I'm not trying to be mysterious, I just don't remember which one. Nothing exciting. DOT? It was for testing particulates in exhaust or something. Hey, I was seven!) he worked at to a laboratory back east, had TONS of paperwork, all official government stuff, his supervisors had cleared it with the airport, etc., etc.
Of course the guards didn't care, they wouldn't call their supervisor, they were positive it was a bomb, they hauled us off to a holding room and called various police agencies and so forth. By the time he got cleared, the plane had left. Of course. And we had arrived three hours early. No apologies, nothing.
Boy, there's a chicken-and-the-egg problem - they have to have all that equipment and personnel to support the huge volumes of junk mail, and they pull in a lot of money from the junk. But if there was suddenly no junk mail (and they eliminated the requisite infrastructure), would they still be operational? They don't make that much money off junk mail... it costs a company something like 19 cents/piece to send it, far less than you and I pay... hmm. Interesting question.
I expect our economy would completely self-destruct if direct marketing ceased.
In the debate about civil rights and liberties, I see daily references to everything and everyone from the Constitution, to Ben Franklin, to the Bill of rights. And rightly so. One person who seems to have been missed (and perhaps I just didn't see it), is the gentleman from Virginia, the strongest advocate for the creation and inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. I am, of course, referring to Patrick Henry, whose "give me liberty, or give me death" again takes on particular importance and relevance.
I do not think he would have had kind words for those who wish to restrict our liberties in exchange for a marginal improvement in "security".
In addition to the panelling on the Hindenburg (a good point, BTW), there was still a large quantity of diesel fuel in the tanks. It's quite visible in the photographs of the accident; it's the flaming stuff pouring down onto the ground (it was for powering the engines).
Hydrogen is not nearly as explosive as gasoline. Not even close. Gasoline has one of the widest ranges of inflammability, i.e. it will burn with almost any amount of oxygen present. Hydrogen is more finicky. That's why they use gasoline in FAE (Fuel Air Explosives).
The energy density of gasoline (or aviation fuel) is much higher than hydrogen. Or most other fuels, for that matter. That's H2's weakest point: to get a given amount of energy, you need to carry considerably more hydrogen than gasoline (by volume, even when compressed). However, this means that the hydrogen does not carry the necessary energy to create as large of an explosion (it'll more likely burn than explode, anyway). It also won't burn nearly as long. See next point. (There are other ways of storing hydrogen than compression, like using hydrides. There are practicality problems here more than safety issues.).
There are other problems with hydrogen, mainly related to its low molecular weight and high diffusion rates. Again, these are practicality problems, not safety problems. The rapid diffusion means it's far safer than, say, natural gas, as it won't remain present in flammable concentrations for very long, and it won't pool in low-lying areas.
All oil refineries use and store vast quantities of hydrogen for use in the cracking process. Now, how many oil-based refinery accidents have there been in the last 30 years? OK, now compare that to how many hydrogen-based refinery accidents there've been.
Why is the military spending large amounts of $ on efforts on funding research for hydrogen-powered airplanes? I don't have time to look for the exact citation, but start poking around at http://www.aero-space.nasa.gov/library/study/ if you're interested.
As for fuel cells in cars, well, that's convoluted and complex. Let's just say that with the way things are going, fuel cell-powered cars may be analogous to cell phones: Europe and Japan will get 'em first, and get better ones too.
Nonesense. How many CS majors are out of work right now? My local LUG's mailing list is full of pleas for employment by CS majors, who know little about anything but computers. By "little about anything", I include those much-derided, but oh-so-important people skills.
Meanwhile, myself (former AIX/Linux Sysadmin), and the former lead programmer from the same company, a company that has severely tightened its belt, have started our own small business. It ain't hi-tech! But it's fun. And with our important skills, like relating to people, understanding how to write well, basic accounting, that sort of thing, we are doing quite well, thank you. After 6 months in this poor business climate, we're both earning more than we did on salary.
His majors? Art, specializing in photography, and general liberal arts degree. Mine? Linguistics, specialty Slavic languages, and geology.
My best friend, with his degree in music, is now the manager of business development at another company that is doing well. He's one of the few "bizdev" managers that I've met that actually accomplishes anything.
Quickly running over a list of my peers, it looks as though most of the unemployed are the ones with specialty degrees, most of the employed have "liberal arts degrees".
There are exceptions to both, of course. But, speaking as someone running a small business, I haven't got room for somebody who isn't well rounded. If I need someone who can programming, I'd rather have someone who is also able to understand broader aspects of the purpose for the software, i.e. for organizing the company, for a product, a one-off, whatever. And I'd be willing to trade some skill at programming for these qualities. Many specialists I've worked with are simply uninterested in knowing the "why" of anything; they just want a problem to solve, and not just any problem. It must pertain to a narrow set of technologies that they are already comfortable with.
P.S. One thing many people with a more well-rounded education learn is how to spell "forrest" when posting headlines, and they are capable of understanding why why this is important, and not something that only anally-retentive Grammar Nazis care about.
Nice... but it probably wouldn't work. At best, you'd end up with a "president" who would have to be propped up with billions in aid each year, while the terrorists continued their business around the countryside. Kind of like that country, um, what was it called? The one the former USSR invaded. Oh, I remember: Afghanistan.
At worst, you'd end up with a different crew, with the same tendencies. And again, terrorists would continue about on their merry way.
It's a mistake to think that everybody in the world craves a democracy, televisions, and a McDonald's on every corner. In a place like Afghanistan, family, clan and the various levels of association between clans are the most important thing. When they are ready for democracy, they will have it. Right now, I don't think they want it.
If there's anything we (by which I mean much of the world, not just the US) need to learn, it's that democracy requires a certain social structure, or it will not work. Just putting in a voting system and a piece of paper with a constitution does not turn a place into a democracy, else Haiti, Serbia and Moldavia would be the most democratic countries on earth. Said social structure must be developed and grown by the people in question, it can't just be created in a vacuum.
You are right that war with Afghanistan would solve nothing. Firstly, no one has ever come close to subjigating the Afghans, and I think no one ever will. Ask the Russians, the British, the Indians, the Persians and so forth. They've all tried, over the centuries, and all backed away with bloody noses, or worse.
"Bomb them back to the stone age." Written in the 60's, regarding Vietnam. Similar sentiments here and there on/., on other boards, sad to say. As then, the problem is that they already live in the stone age. And that's not an insult - they just have very little, and live the way they have for 1000's of years. Sure, they have cell phones, computers, etc., but those are only tools they use to deal with us on our terms.
Lastly, most Afghans are being squashed by the Taliban. They don't like it. They put up with it partly out of fear of the Taliban, partly because they fear the West, and the Taliban promise protection from the West. A little respect and discrimination (in the sense of "discerning between various groups", not in the sense of "excluding certain groups for no good reason") would go a long way towards alleviating that fear. The Afghani people haven't, I think, forgotten the help they received against the Russians. They may be bitter that they received no followup after driving the Russians out, but one shouldn't underestimate the character of a people, based on the actions of a lunatic who's from another country entirely. I think the character of a people who have withstood incursion after incursion must be extraordarily strong.
In summary, I think invasion, in the name of peace or otherwise, would harden them against reason. They might make allowances for a time, if it were understood to be a quick and swift attack to root out those responsible for last Tuesday. But trying to impose an outside order on them, then expect them to like us? Arrogance disguised as benevolence. Patronizing. Let's learn from history, people, that's what it's for.
(Sorry for the strong reaction, it's not just to the replied-to post, it's sort of pent up in reaction to many posts in the last several days).
Slashdot Mirror
Plant protein is plenty good enough, provided one has a decently varied diet. It is not necessary to consume high quality (i.e. all essential amino acids) protein at one sitting. Spreading it out over a week or so is more than adequate, especially given the abundance of food in N. America.
On the other hand, many vegetarians have inadequate intake of vitamin B-12 and may suffer from out of balance homocystine levels. Thus some are at greater risk for heart attack than one might think. Most soy products, and many breakfast cereals now have added B-12; any type of dairy product also has high levels of B-12 (higher than meat products, in fact) and is a complete protein as well.
Re protein osteoporosis:
protein. Am J Clin Nutr, 1988;48:880-3.
calcium stone-formation in the urinary tract. Clinical Science,
1979;57:285-288.
Note that those are fairly old references, but newer studies have simply shown the same thing even more conclusively.
As an aside, there is some evidence that athletes (i.e. Olympic-level, not weekend warrior types) may improve their strength slightly faster when they include some meat, preferably fish, in their diet.
But the artificially produced vitamin C is subtly different, and, in fact has measurable oxidizing and mutagenic effects (sorry, it's PDF. There are also newer and better studies if you search hard enough).
Similar results have been noted with artificial beta-carotene. The manufacturers are modifying the supplements now, but it gives an idea of how little we understand the nutrition processes.
Incidentally, artificial vitamin C first came under scrutiny in the mid-80's, when it was discovered that it did not prevent scurvy, but fruit-derived vitamin C did.
Lastly, it's pretty well known now that, while vitamins and minerals are very important, there are a lot of phytochemicals in the plant-based foods that are extremely important to health, and we only know what a fraction of them are. They can only load the supplements with what we already know about.
OK, that's certainly true enough. I apologize if I misinterpreted what you wrote. There's too many *@*#%ng DB morons out there (that I deal with daily), so I was probably too quick to be unfair to you.
This statement indicates a profound ignorance of basic database design. The entire purpose of a relational database is to maintain n-dimensional structures! To put it crudely, each table describes one dimension, and a given database can therefore have as many dimensions as desired (within physical limits).
That's the reason why so many well-trained people spend their time babbling about normalization, first-, second-, third-normal form and so forth. Some people (I've worked with many) think that normalization is a fussy, over-theoretical waste of time, and start throwing out buzzwords, depending upon their age, such as "object-relational", "XML-database" and so forth.
"Right now postges sends a message to the application saying, this is locked retry transaction..."
That's pretty unlikely, given that Postgresql uses multiversion concurrency control - again, put crudely, two different instances, say one a read and one a write, are effectively not even looking at the same DB, but at two independent "virtual" copies of the "real" DB (yes, Postgresql people, I know that's not quite right. That's why I said "crude"). It's possible for a lock conflict to occur, but not likely. And there is a lock resolution mechanism, so it's even more unlikely that an error message will pop up.
A dot-bomb I was contracting for had ordered three racks, stuffed with the requisite servers, switches and so forth (mostly Compaq and Cisco stuff). The boss was great at programming, but not so bright when it came to physical items.
The populated racks arrived in town, at the vendor's local warehouse. They called and asked how it should be delivered. The boss insisted on talking to them, rather than letting the shipping/receiving guy deal with the new toys. Consequently the vendor was told, by the boss, that we had a loading dock at our building. We did not.
"But I thought a loading zone was the same as a loading dock." he later declared. Sorry Dean, they are different.
So the truck & racks arrived. Naturally, they'd sent a truck without a hydraulic/electric tailgate, and only one guy. Each rack was about 1100 lbs. The boss wanted to try unloading them then and there, but even he soon realized that that was not feasible. So they went back.
Several days passed, but the vendor had no suitable truck. After a lot of tantrums from the boss, they finally rented a truck with the necessary tailgate. It arrived at our building, and unloaded the racks and their pallets. Incidentally, everything was properly secured inside the truck both times.
Unfortunately, the boss (who had personally ordered the equipment, which was totally wrong for our needs, but that's another story) never checked dimensions. The racks were 1/2" taller than the elevator doors.
Impatient boss didn't want to remove the servers, etc., disassemble the racks and take the pieces upstairs. Rather, he insisted on getting everyone from the office, removing the pallets (after which the racks were still that 1/2" too tall) and trying to ram them through the doors. Dean sometimes had a hard time with concepts like "metal" and "concrete". Several bad dents and chips later, he gave up.
Next, Dean thought of the brilliant idea of tilting 1100 lb racks. On a tile floor. Even with everyone helping, once tilted, it started sliding uncontrollably and fell over with a massive boom.
Did this discourage him? Nope. He (with help) shoved the first one into the elevator, and somehow got it angled in there. When the doors closed, they scraped along the bottom corner of the rack, and the stainless steel took a nasty gouging.
Unfortunately, the elevator was rated for 800 lbs, not 1100lbs, certainly not 1100lbs with Dean and three helpers = almost 2000 lbs. Nothing dramatic, but the elevator safeties cut in and the elevator wouldn't budge.
Deans's solution? Use a screwdriver and force the fireman's override switch on, of course. I decided it was prudent to take lunch just then. When I got back, they'd gotten:
When they finally made it into the server room, we discovered that, as one might suspect, a number of the units did not function, and had to be replaced. Sure enough, the boss tried to get it replaced on warranty, but I left not long after, so I don't know how things played out...
So you're actually assisting in the battle against evil when you deal harshly with cats.
FWIW, my sister's cat has almost convinced me that Ashcroft is right.
He moved to Canada a few years ago. His alcoholism got out of control. In the meantime, he managed to legally immigrate. Then he sobered up, moved to (I think) Alberta, where he was going to run for parliament.
Somehow, that didn't work out. So he moved to Vancouver with his wife (?). He fell off the wagon again, got tossed in jail for domestic assault (he started screaming at her and slapped her in a restaurant).
She didn't press charges, but they're still thinking about prosecuting anyway. In the meantime, he's living in a trailer (or traileresque home, hard to tell from the newspaper picture). Apparently he doesn't do much but come into Vancouver to drink and fight. Some guys even beat him up a few weeks back, jumped him when he was leaving a bar. Put him in the hospital.
By most accounts, he's actually quite similar in personality to his character on Law & Order. He seems to have a lot of friends who will speak up/look out for him, so I suspect, as always, there's more to the story than what one reads in the paper.
Not to mention the amusing gyroscopic effects that a flywheel induces. Want to turn the corner? Well, you better hope your tires have enough traction to overcome the tendency of the flywheel to not want to go around the corner.
That's for vertically-mounted flywheels. If they're mounted flat, they do interesting things to the ride (and hence the handling) of the car, by virtue of the fact that the car needs to be able to pitch and roll somewhat in order to absorb bumps.
Yeah, there are various things that can be done, but boy is it a lot of work (=expensive)!
Surely some of that contributed to the weight gain? No doubt safety features contributed weight as well, but note that road deaths in the U.S. have dropped from about 50,000 to about 40,000 annually. That's despite a larger population and more drivers. And I doubt it has much to do with drivers getting better... :)
Mortar shells cost a fair bit more than that, artillery shells still more. Particularly the newer ones. But there is a cheap way to overwhelm such a system. :)
AHA! I think you've hit on the real problem here... God knows the marketroids at my company are constantly nagging everyone to use XML for everything, and often come back from a call saying something like "I told Client Z that we use XML for this, this, and that. We do, right?"
The Liberals didn't drop the rating system because they're fair-minded and principled. Rather, they view implementing it as an unnecessary nuisance of an expense. Their only moral standard is a "$", and if you take the time to observe, you'll note that they are mostly interested in the $ in their own pockets.
So, why are our coders leaving? Because they want their kids to have a good education, and they want to have health care they can count on. These guys won't get paid as well, but they've grown tired of seeing the "capitalist" U.S. fund public services in a sensible and adequate manner. A manner which is considerably more lavish than what "socialist" BC does. At the same time, they're seeing the Liberals, in a few short months, gutting what's left of the BC public services.
Washington and Oregon aren't Utopia, but they are stealing BC nurses, teachers and skilled workers by the thousands.
Amazing that no one in BC remembers what Gordon Campbell did when he was mayor of Vancouver. Oh well, as Mr. Churchill said, "people usually get exactly the kind of government they deserve"!
Nope. It's real. It's a nerve gas, developed by the Germans in the early 20th century, IIRC. It was used by a fanatical Japanese cult to gas a subway in Tokyo a few years ago. Killed approx. a dozen people, made another thousand or so quite ill. Some have never fully recovered. Its attraction is that it's relatively easy to manufacture.
"Oh, I'm sorry sir, we have to detain you, you only earned $29k last year, that fits the profile of a terrorist. So is the fact that you bought a Whopper Jr. last year and you haven't got any kids! Very suspicious behavior."
Often the argument is put forth that "if you haven't done anything wrong, you haven't got anything to hide." No, an information database like that gives people in law enforcement an anoymous way to search for and harass people based on the officer's personal bias. This could be an FBI agent who doesn't like Methodists, or Joe Cop who doesn't like environmentalists. It's bad enough already, without making it too easy. My SO had a cop show up at her door and ask her for a date. He saw her driving, liked her looks, ran her license plate and got her address. He sawnothing wrong with that. When I objected, he pointed out he could "flag" her entry, and we would get stopped every time the license plate was run. Now imagine if lots of personal data were linked to this, and you get some idea of the problems that would have to be solved... just because he didn't like me, I could have problems no matter where I travelled. In this particular case, unfortunately for him, a friend of mine was his supervisor. :/
It is possible to come up with fairly decent systems that do *not* require a centralized database (this would, arguably, increase reliability). In fact, many companies have developed such systems. The "big boys" don't promote these, because the greatest profitibility lies in the data, not the security.
I think the idea (make it easier for law enforcement to track the bad guys) is perfectly valid, but the implementations which have been proposed are poor. They are always clumsy and burdensome, and would be perfect for tracking law-abiding citizens, and useless for tracking the Bad Guys. So vast resources would be wasted in harassing and tracking people of no interest.
P.S. Yes, we often use birth certificates. More often driver's licenses, since most everyone has them. But those are handled state by state, not by the federal government, and they're not mandatory (except to drive...).
The island you are referring to is Thera, also called Santorini. The idea that the eruption of Thera destroyed Minoan civilization has been around for about 30 years, so it's not exactly a recent idea. What we know is that there was a catastrophic eruption of Thera, an explosion that was approximately 1000x larger than Mt. St. Helens. There are geologic strata throughout the Eastern Mediterranean containing ash from that eruption. The ashfall even made it to Egypt, and there are believed to have been decent size tsunami that made it as far as Egypt (although not catastrophic waves, it seems).
Security is pretty good. There is exactly one access point. (Alarms on the emergency exits, etc.). The guard is quite thorough. By now, he knows me, but he won't let me in. Someone who will vouch for me must physically come out and get me. Even then, I need a badge, and it only permits me access to the sections it's colour-coded to. I am told that people have been escorted out quickly when going into an area that doesn't match their badge. I'm also told that I get in relatively easily, since I'm a close relative.
Even though the guard knows the employees, he still has to check their badges on the way in, and he's not lax about it. When they had a substitute guard at one point, he *didn't* know me, and he was extremely suspicious, even after I was cleared.
Delivery people are simply not allowed in. They leave stuff in front of the guard kiosk, and someone comes down to fetch it. I'm sure there are ways to get through, but it's not bad.
I haven't been there since Sept. 11, so I don't know if they've tightened things at all. I do know that the next security level up requires people to use their access cards just to get to the guard kiosk (i.e. they lock the outside doors).
Oh, *that* detail! Yes, there would certainly be some problems with flex if you had a long enough lever arm... the elevator's probably more practical. :)
Not really. That's one of the (many) great advantages of a trebuchet over a catapult: the acceleration is *not* greatest at the beginning. It's reasonably constant throughout the action. That's why you can make a trebuchet shoot farther/faster than a catapult, without requiring heftier components.
Of course the guards didn't care, they wouldn't call their supervisor, they were positive it was a bomb, they hauled us off to a holding room and called various police agencies and so forth. By the time he got cleared, the plane had left. Of course. And we had arrived three hours early. No apologies, nothing.
I expect our economy would completely self-destruct if direct marketing ceased.
I do not think he would have had kind words for those who wish to restrict our liberties in exchange for a marginal improvement in "security".
Meanwhile, myself (former AIX/Linux Sysadmin), and the former lead programmer from the same company, a company that has severely tightened its belt, have started our own small business. It ain't hi-tech! But it's fun. And with our important skills, like relating to people, understanding how to write well, basic accounting, that sort of thing, we are doing quite well, thank you. After 6 months in this poor business climate, we're both earning more than we did on salary.
His majors? Art, specializing in photography, and general liberal arts degree. Mine? Linguistics, specialty Slavic languages, and geology.
My best friend, with his degree in music, is now the manager of business development at another company that is doing well. He's one of the few "bizdev" managers that I've met that actually accomplishes anything.
Quickly running over a list of my peers, it looks as though most of the unemployed are the ones with specialty degrees, most of the employed have "liberal arts degrees".
There are exceptions to both, of course. But, speaking as someone running a small business, I haven't got room for somebody who isn't well rounded. If I need someone who can programming, I'd rather have someone who is also able to understand broader aspects of the purpose for the software, i.e. for organizing the company, for a product, a one-off, whatever. And I'd be willing to trade some skill at programming for these qualities. Many specialists I've worked with are simply uninterested in knowing the "why" of anything; they just want a problem to solve, and not just any problem. It must pertain to a narrow set of technologies that they are already comfortable with.
P.S. One thing many people with a more well-rounded education learn is how to spell "forrest" when posting headlines, and they are capable of understanding why why this is important, and not something that only anally-retentive Grammar Nazis care about.
Hey, you left out the Wright brothers. That would be one less tool for terrorists, if the bastards hadn't successfully developed airplanes.
At worst, you'd end up with a different crew, with the same tendencies. And again, terrorists would continue about on their merry way.
It's a mistake to think that everybody in the world craves a democracy, televisions, and a McDonald's on every corner. In a place like Afghanistan, family, clan and the various levels of association between clans are the most important thing. When they are ready for democracy, they will have it. Right now, I don't think they want it.
If there's anything we (by which I mean much of the world, not just the US) need to learn, it's that democracy requires a certain social structure, or it will not work. Just putting in a voting system and a piece of paper with a constitution does not turn a place into a democracy, else Haiti, Serbia and Moldavia would be the most democratic countries on earth. Said social structure must be developed and grown by the people in question, it can't just be created in a vacuum.
You are right that war with Afghanistan would solve nothing. Firstly, no one has ever come close to subjigating the Afghans, and I think no one ever will. Ask the Russians, the British, the Indians, the Persians and so forth. They've all tried, over the centuries, and all backed away with bloody noses, or worse.
"Bomb them back to the stone age." Written in the 60's, regarding Vietnam. Similar sentiments here and there on /., on other boards, sad to say. As then, the problem is that they already live in the stone age. And that's not an insult - they just have very little, and live the way they have for 1000's of years. Sure, they have cell phones, computers, etc., but those are only tools they use to deal with us on our terms.
Lastly, most Afghans are being squashed by the Taliban. They don't like it. They put up with it partly out of fear of the Taliban, partly because they fear the West, and the Taliban promise protection from the West. A little respect and discrimination (in the sense of "discerning between various groups", not in the sense of "excluding certain groups for no good reason") would go a long way towards alleviating that fear. The Afghani people haven't, I think, forgotten the help they received against the Russians. They may be bitter that they received no followup after driving the Russians out, but one shouldn't underestimate the character of a people, based on the actions of a lunatic who's from another country entirely. I think the character of a people who have withstood incursion after incursion must be extraordarily strong.
In summary, I think invasion, in the name of peace or otherwise, would harden them against reason. They might make allowances for a time, if it were understood to be a quick and swift attack to root out those responsible for last Tuesday. But trying to impose an outside order on them, then expect them to like us? Arrogance disguised as benevolence. Patronizing. Let's learn from history, people, that's what it's for.
(Sorry for the strong reaction, it's not just to the replied-to post, it's sort of pent up in reaction to many posts in the last several days).