Did you actually read my post, or did you just skim it and then decide to make ad-hominem attacks because you can't come up with anything else?
Nowhere did I comment on the level of punishment. Nowhere did I say anything about "just sending them to counseling" regarding anything; my comments about the war on drugs is merely that it, as a strategy primarily relying on punishment, has failed. This is pretty much indisputable.
In fact, I agree wholeheartedly with your statement regarding the state of discipline for children and its replacement by medication.
Learn to read. Also, grow up; throwing insults around as in your post is a really just a way to be viewed as a child and ignored.
I don't believe that the parent said anything about not *blaming* the perpetrators for the crime. But punishment, in and of itself, is rarely a solution to anything- witness the perpetual failure that is the war on drugs.
It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that we investigate and attempt to fix the causes of crimes, *in addition* the punishing those caught perpetrating them.
The world is not black and white. Your "you must be a bleeding heart who's causing all our problems by not letting us shoot petty criminals" attitude is not a solution, it's part of the problem.
Vietnam was definitely a fuckup. Barbara Tuchman does a great look into how the US government managed to get more and more deeply mired in something that even people at the moment knew was stupid- and yet did anyway; see _The March of Folly_ (Vietnam is the third major section of the book).
(Barbara Tuchman was a multiple-Pulitzer prize winning author who also wrote such classics as _The Guns of August_; I'm not suggesting any partisan hackery here).
I don't think we're actually disagreeing here. You're pointing out that new technology which is initially represented as restricted to a niche can evolve beyond that niche. That's something I agree with- but my point is that, if tablets evolve in that direction, then they (like all your other examples) will effectively become what they have replaced.
The only thing really keeping something like the iPad from begin a general purpose computer is the lack of a document management solution and the walled garden approach to app installation. Once that changes (or a competitor fixes those issues) what will be the difference between the two? Tablet gaming will basically become the same as PC gaming, with the exception of limited interfaces... but even then, I could easily see tablet games coming out requiring certain peripherals.
You could argue that they're closer to the console model, but I'd have to disagree: the product lifecycle is much more similar to the PC, given release cycles and platform fragmentation; even the iPhone has several not-100%-compatible versions out there.
Netbooks, tablets, iDevices, etc *are* taking a lot of people's computing time and interest away from the PC. However, there remain a huge number of tasks- any sort of content creation whatsoever, really, some few app examples notwithstanding- that simply are not suited to that sort of form fact. People's computing will always have, in the background, some sort of general purpose device.
Now, you may say that portables, tablets, etc will evolve to the point that this is no longer true. But if that happens, then it actually proves my point, because such devices will have *become* general purpose computing devices, and therefore the "PC" and its associated games will still be around.
If and when the tablets "win", it will only be because they have become what they defeated.
It's not necessarily hypocrisy- only if the complaint with US foreign policy is based on a complaint about the use of power rather than on what the US is attempting to force others to do. It would be perfectly consistent to desire an outside force to impose a "good" order while decrying what one sees as an outside for imposing a "bad" one. Humans have done this throughout history; it's the reason why, for instance, a people can oppose an invading religious crusade and then feel completely justified in turning around and attempting to do the same to their neighbors.
Now that's not to say that any of this is anything but absurd, but it's not *necessarily* hypocritical.
Triggers that are poorly written (in *any* language) and perform too much work too frequently. Lots of possibilities here; everything from just poorly written trigger code to triggers that cause huge amounts of extra work to be done unnecessarily or too often.
As I said in my original comment, though, the fact that this *can* happen doesn't mean they can't be very useful when written and engineered by someone competent.
Part of the reason MySQL gets treated as a toy is its release discipline- or lack thereof. At least one of the 5.x releases came out with *known* data-loss bugs; that's just not even remotely acceptable in a database, and that's the sort of impression that's hard to shake: people aren't just going to look at subsequent releases and go "oh, well, they say they're paying more attention this time, I guess that's good enough".
Business logic never belongs in the DB. Even triggers are suspect. They can be horribly inefficient.
The fact that triggers *can* be inefficient is no reason not to use them when there's a good implementation and competent DBAs to make sure they *aren't*. Also, business logic never belongs in the DB? To the contrary- a lot of business logic is sets of rules to maintain consistency between various things. That sort of logic is *precisely* what belongs in the DB, rather than scattered throughout a variety of applications running on top of it.
The problem is not that these people are *stupid*; rather, it's that they think they're smarter than they are. They convince themselves that they're smart enough not to get caught.
Also: knowing how to make a modern nuclear weapon is a lot harder, and a lot more of a secret, than you'd think. A dirty bomb of the sort we dropped on Hiroshima? No, not necessarily. A hydrogen bomb? That's an order of magnitude more difficult, and requires a huge amount of engineering effort to shape everything properly. There are a number of countries with nuclear capability, but that doesn't mean they all have equal nuclear proficiency, and the most modern stuff is an incredibly well-kept secret.
I think you missed the actual parent to my post: "Technically the sound barrier isn't a barrier either!" I was correcting that statement, not Captain Segfault's.
Well, if you can't credibly use wikipedia to cite a well-known medical book such as the DSM-IV-TR, then what can you cite with wikipedia?
Nothing.
Use Wikipedia as a jumping-off point for finding sources. It is not a source itself, and should never be cited (unless you're actually discussing Wikipedia itself, in which case a citation might be appropriate).
Actually, if you look at shockwave dynamics during the moment an object crosses from subsonic to supersonic velocity, it can very easily be considered much more of a barrier than 1gkeys/sec can.
Uh, handling of nulls, empty strings, and default values are not the same as in anything else. They're also absolutely horrible practice and encouraging new users to learn them is flat out retarded.
Also, I very pointedly didn't mention PostgreSQL. I advocated any standards-compliant DB. MySQL does not fit that bill.
It is- but *learning* sql via MySQL is a horrible idea. It allows a lot of shortcuts that are both wrong and dangerous if you're not very sure of what you're doing; learners are much better off with *any* database that's more standards-oriented.
No. You may not be able to determine ahead of time that it's not going to halt, but that doesn't mean you can't sandbox it in such a way as to prevent it from blocking other things until you determine, from an external source, that it is likely to not be going anywhere and likely should be killed. Especially in a modern OS and with modern multiprocessor machines, where threading isn't merely convenient but essential for getting good use of the hardware.
Err, no, they can't, actually. Sats have much worse imaging capability and have interference from weather, not to mention only periodic imaging capabilities. (Either you're talking about something in geo, in which case it's quite far away, or leo, in which case it's only going to pass over the site for picture taking every so often.)
Airships are actually quite good for this sort of task.
You've got some fairly simplistic views of airships. While they're not exactly *fast*, they're not as slow as you seem to be indicating. They're also phenomenally efficient for this sort of task. In spotting and monitoring activities the speed of a plane is actually a detriment.
Airships are still under quite active development. There are a lot of tasks for which "go really fast" is not a requirement, and "stay in the air a long time without consuming more fuel than the oil spill" *is*.
Some of his social commentary can be clever. Much of it is very much the product of his times, and much of it is also fairly ridiculous.
The problem isn't with any of these groupings of it, really, though- the problem is that while he does it really well in some cases, he also comes across with the subtlety of a sledgehammer sometimes, and it can get really annoying by the end of the work.
Walking 1/4 of a mile to the bus seems a little long? Really?
This is why public transportation in the US has such a hard time. Distances beyond the car in the driveway are simply to arduous for the common man, so either fares have to go up (to pay for all the extra buses since each one takes so long making so many stops) or people just take cars anyway because they can't handle walking a bit.
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Did you actually read my post, or did you just skim it and then decide to make ad-hominem attacks because you can't come up with anything else?
Nowhere did I comment on the level of punishment. Nowhere did I say anything about "just sending them to counseling" regarding anything; my comments about the war on drugs is merely that it, as a strategy primarily relying on punishment, has failed. This is pretty much indisputable.
In fact, I agree wholeheartedly with your statement regarding the state of discipline for children and its replacement by medication.
Learn to read. Also, grow up; throwing insults around as in your post is a really just a way to be viewed as a child and ignored.
I don't believe that the parent said anything about not *blaming* the perpetrators for the crime. But punishment, in and of itself, is rarely a solution to anything- witness the perpetual failure that is the war on drugs.
It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that we investigate and attempt to fix the causes of crimes, *in addition* the punishing those caught perpetrating them.
The world is not black and white. Your "you must be a bleeding heart who's causing all our problems by not letting us shoot petty criminals" attitude is not a solution, it's part of the problem.
Vietnam was definitely a fuckup. Barbara Tuchman does a great look into how the US government managed to get more and more deeply mired in something that even people at the moment knew was stupid- and yet did anyway; see _The March of Folly_ (Vietnam is the third major section of the book).
(Barbara Tuchman was a multiple-Pulitzer prize winning author who also wrote such classics as _The Guns of August_; I'm not suggesting any partisan hackery here).
I don't think we're actually disagreeing here. You're pointing out that new technology which is initially represented as restricted to a niche can evolve beyond that niche. That's something I agree with- but my point is that, if tablets evolve in that direction, then they (like all your other examples) will effectively become what they have replaced.
The only thing really keeping something like the iPad from begin a general purpose computer is the lack of a document management solution and the walled garden approach to app installation. Once that changes (or a competitor fixes those issues) what will be the difference between the two? Tablet gaming will basically become the same as PC gaming, with the exception of limited interfaces... but even then, I could easily see tablet games coming out requiring certain peripherals.
You could argue that they're closer to the console model, but I'd have to disagree: the product lifecycle is much more similar to the PC, given release cycles and platform fragmentation; even the iPhone has several not-100%-compatible versions out there.
This is pretty much complete BS.
Netbooks, tablets, iDevices, etc *are* taking a lot of people's computing time and interest away from the PC. However, there remain a huge number of tasks- any sort of content creation whatsoever, really, some few app examples notwithstanding- that simply are not suited to that sort of form fact. People's computing will always have, in the background, some sort of general purpose device.
Now, you may say that portables, tablets, etc will evolve to the point that this is no longer true. But if that happens, then it actually proves my point, because such devices will have *become* general purpose computing devices, and therefore the "PC" and its associated games will still be around.
If and when the tablets "win", it will only be because they have become what they defeated.
It's not necessarily hypocrisy- only if the complaint with US foreign policy is based on a complaint about the use of power rather than on what the US is attempting to force others to do. It would be perfectly consistent to desire an outside force to impose a "good" order while decrying what one sees as an outside for imposing a "bad" one. Humans have done this throughout history; it's the reason why, for instance, a people can oppose an invading religious crusade and then feel completely justified in turning around and attempting to do the same to their neighbors.
Now that's not to say that any of this is anything but absurd, but it's not *necessarily* hypocritical.
Triggers that are poorly written (in *any* language) and perform too much work too frequently. Lots of possibilities here; everything from just poorly written trigger code to triggers that cause huge amounts of extra work to be done unnecessarily or too often.
As I said in my original comment, though, the fact that this *can* happen doesn't mean they can't be very useful when written and engineered by someone competent.
I'm not sure what a native/non-native discussion has to do with this: Postgresql allows for native c-language triggers.
Part of the reason MySQL gets treated as a toy is its release discipline- or lack thereof. At least one of the 5.x releases came out with *known* data-loss bugs; that's just not even remotely acceptable in a database, and that's the sort of impression that's hard to shake: people aren't just going to look at subsequent releases and go "oh, well, they say they're paying more attention this time, I guess that's good enough".
Business logic never belongs in the DB. Even triggers are suspect. They can be horribly inefficient.
The fact that triggers *can* be inefficient is no reason not to use them when there's a good implementation and competent DBAs to make sure they *aren't*. Also, business logic never belongs in the DB? To the contrary- a lot of business logic is sets of rules to maintain consistency between various things. That sort of logic is *precisely* what belongs in the DB, rather than scattered throughout a variety of applications running on top of it.
I think you've got your databases backward when it comes to integrity and verification...
Err, have you actually used the PostgreSQL manual? It's one of the best manuals I've ever seen for a software product.
The problem is not that these people are *stupid*; rather, it's that they think they're smarter than they are. They convince themselves that they're smart enough not to get caught.
Also: knowing how to make a modern nuclear weapon is a lot harder, and a lot more of a secret, than you'd think. A dirty bomb of the sort we dropped on Hiroshima? No, not necessarily. A hydrogen bomb? That's an order of magnitude more difficult, and requires a huge amount of engineering effort to shape everything properly. There are a number of countries with nuclear capability, but that doesn't mean they all have equal nuclear proficiency, and the most modern stuff is an incredibly well-kept secret.
I think you missed the actual parent to my post: "Technically the sound barrier isn't a barrier either!" I was correcting that statement, not Captain Segfault's.
Well, if you can't credibly use wikipedia to cite a well-known medical book such as the DSM-IV-TR, then what can you cite with wikipedia?
Nothing.
Use Wikipedia as a jumping-off point for finding sources. It is not a source itself, and should never be cited (unless you're actually discussing Wikipedia itself, in which case a citation might be appropriate).
Actually, if you look at shockwave dynamics during the moment an object crosses from subsonic to supersonic velocity, it can very easily be considered much more of a barrier than 1gkeys/sec can.
Uh, handling of nulls, empty strings, and default values are not the same as in anything else. They're also absolutely horrible practice and encouraging new users to learn them is flat out retarded.
Also, I very pointedly didn't mention PostgreSQL. I advocated any standards-compliant DB. MySQL does not fit that bill.
It is- but *learning* sql via MySQL is a horrible idea. It allows a lot of shortcuts that are both wrong and dangerous if you're not very sure of what you're doing; learners are much better off with *any* database that's more standards-oriented.
No. You may not be able to determine ahead of time that it's not going to halt, but that doesn't mean you can't sandbox it in such a way as to prevent it from blocking other things until you determine, from an external source, that it is likely to not be going anywhere and likely should be killed. Especially in a modern OS and with modern multiprocessor machines, where threading isn't merely convenient but essential for getting good use of the hardware.
It's really not even worth asking that with regards to slashdot moderation, unfortunately.
Err, no, they can't, actually. Sats have much worse imaging capability and have interference from weather, not to mention only periodic imaging capabilities. (Either you're talking about something in geo, in which case it's quite far away, or leo, in which case it's only going to pass over the site for picture taking every so often.)
Airships are actually quite good for this sort of task.
You've got some fairly simplistic views of airships. While they're not exactly *fast*, they're not as slow as you seem to be indicating. They're also phenomenally efficient for this sort of task. In spotting and monitoring activities the speed of a plane is actually a detriment.
Airships are still under quite active development. There are a lot of tasks for which "go really fast" is not a requirement, and "stay in the air a long time without consuming more fuel than the oil spill" *is*.
Some of his social commentary can be clever. Much of it is very much the product of his times, and much of it is also fairly ridiculous.
The problem isn't with any of these groupings of it, really, though- the problem is that while he does it really well in some cases, he also comes across with the subtlety of a sledgehammer sometimes, and it can get really annoying by the end of the work.
Walking 1/4 of a mile to the bus seems a little long? Really?
This is why public transportation in the US has such a hard time. Distances beyond the car in the driveway are simply to arduous for the common man, so either fares have to go up (to pay for all the extra buses since each one takes so long making so many stops) or people just take cars anyway because they can't handle walking a bit.
That's probably true- but in that case I'd say the problem is to fix the monopoly rather than protect a largely anti-consumer secondary market.