No matter how many times I click refresh, the DoubleClick corporate site will not not display any banner ads, nor pop up nor pop under any X10 windows...
Oh, what did you say? "The leader in network advertising" only has tasteful advertisements on their own site?
Isn't that a tad hypocritical?
Shouldn't the people advocating annoying, bouncing, animated, rollover tripe beleive in their own products and techniques enough to use it on their own pages?
Clearly they don't, and they don't.
One could only dream of the day when all the advertisers who patronize DoubleClick ask them selves why DoubleClick doesn't use their own service to advertise their own service...
Perhaps because their customers would realize how much such techniques annoy and drive off potential clients....?
Nah, marketeers (as in mouse, not misspelling 8-) will never get wise to their own lack of wisdom.
The only way a true geek can tell if an email is a fraud is by checking where the links go. In the test all the links had been redirected, so the test results are a tad skewed if they include the false "frauds."
That is, I was fairly sure that one of the links looked an awful lot like a real eamil I had received, so I rated it as non-fraud.
All the others I rated as frauds because "if I cannot validate the link targets, it is classified as fraud no matter where it came from." So I miss-marked a couple of the "legit" ones as frauds.
Does that mean I cannot tell the difference? No, it means that I use the "if you don't know, don't trust it" rule.
Besides, at those prices, "legitamate offers" from the provider were sufficently outrageous to set off my "rippoff" detector.
If a real company wan't to charge me an unrealistic fee for a trivial service, it's a fraud email even if it *ISN'T* "phishing" 8-)
Robots make very poor scientists. Moving the people to the science produces better science. This is why we send manned submarines to the depths of the oceans and put guys into heat suits to risk their asses at the edges of volcanos.
Relegating the science to the robots is bad thinging, we want the peopel standing over the work for the same reasons that, robots *could* be used for brain/heart/liver/etc surgery by remote control, we perfer to have the surgeon standing over the body.
Solving habatat problems for robots is an uninteresting problem set as it is easier to build robots for the target habatat than to create a habat for a target robot.
Its about getting maximum bang for the buck. It's about how many times you get to spend each dollar.
While some *VERY MEGAR* (relative) gains can be had for in the continuance of the robotic remote probe techniques we are practicing today, the huge advances that came along with the Apollo (etc) manned programs will be lacking.
Consider this thought problem: you have twelve cubic feet and 500 pounds to work with; create a "first aid station cum doctors office" that *must* support ten people for two years.
These are the kinds of thought problems that demand the kinds of innovation that produce legendary advancements in medical, environmental, and material science. How useful would re-usable, electrically self-sterilizing bandages empregnated with a perminant catylist that acts as an anti-biotic be here on earth? Such a beast would be ideal for that medicine cabinet we are packing off to mars with "those brave souls" whomever they may be.
As a problem that challenges man to advance, and would pay off here on earth, "Pack a lander off to Mars, you have 12 cubic feet and 500 pounds" is no where near as fruitful a problem.
See, when you have the strict requirements and no second chances. When "the worst thing that can happen" is much more serious than "the really expensive remote control car isn't answering", you get concentrated motiviation.
If that motivation is aimed at making things better for people (in any context), as opposed to making things better for machines (in spesific context), you tend to produce things that make it better for any human being in every context.
Better to spend 10 trillion dollars to benefit man then to spend 1 trillion to benefit the cause of RC Racers...
For years on Solaris using POSIX Threads I did the following:
[ASIDE: You can't do this under the current pthreads linux implementation in the 2.4 kernel, but you might be able to under 2.6, I havn't checked.]
From the main thread, before you make your frist pthread_create calll, for any given signal (e.g. SIGIO and SIGALRM) install a no-op signal handler, that is one that just returns, and that is not set to resume (e.g. that will cause the errno=EINTR response. Then block/mask that signal.
Make a thread-safe list-of-structures abstraction.
Now, for each such signal make a single thread to act as the "real handler" and use sigwait in that thread to "really catch" the signal.
Other threads then register callbacks, wakeups, etc on the list-of-structures.
Different signals may take different details for optimization and accuracy. (Redistributing SIGALRM is the easiest.)
If you use C++ you can basically make the list-of-structures indistinguisable from an OS service.
I also usually make SIGUSR1 restartable and SIGUSR2 nonrestartable so that I can use pthread_kill() to forward signal indications and interrupt blocking calls.
It isn't actually all that tough to mix threads and signals and callbacks if you plan for it from the get-go.
Aparently it is hard for some people to understand that it is worth the trip even if you don't expect to have a nice native population to exploit uppon your arrival.
The "but there is nothing there (to live on)" argument falls apart thusly:
1) There is something there. It isn't a lush tropical expanse of airable land. It is, however, "valuable realestate" for providing the raw materials we will need once we use up this planet.
2) There is... valuable realestate for providing the open space we will need for our ever-expanding population
3) There is... valuable realestate which provides means to study the universe (physics etc) without the bothersome atmosphere.
4) There is... valuable realestate to occupy, if we do it _BEFOREAHND_ if the earth takes a hard punch at fractional-C (or solar orbital velocity) from a "massive" body. [If we wait for the punch, it will be too late to scramble into space.]
5) The actual pursuit will fund research and development in Medicine.
6)... will fund research in Environmental Sciences.
7)... will fund research in Physics.
8)... will fund research in Materials and Manufacturing....
N+1)... will fund research in topic(N+1).
This debate puts me in mind of some song from the seventies (cant remember the title) that had a line like: "spent a billion dollars to go to the moon. Brought back a bag of rocks... Must be nice rocks..."
In this case, the trip itself is incredibly valuable to us here in terms of our own life and well-being.
In this case, the understanding of habitat necessary to create *artifical* habitat could revolutionize our own habatat here on earth (notice the repeating word) and coudl lead to ways to sustain and repair the one we are shitting all over down here.
The argument against seems to be "if there are no native inhabitants there to exploit, and the streets of the cities of those primitives are not lined with gold, we might as well forget it."
After all, you seem to say, if its work and the payoff isn't obvious in banannas and slaves to pick them, we might as well stay home.
(Yes, that last is a troll-like and unfair generalization of your position; but if you get to generalize away all the benefits of the pursuit because the travelers will not easily survive shipwreck; then I get to generalize *in* what you might demand of the trip in order to have the trip seem worthwile. 8-)
There is no "no offense" verion of "that is totally gay". If you are going to be a biggot or a jackass, *OWN* the jackassary... 8-)
Would you also dare:
"No offense, that is such a lying jew tactic"? "No offense, but what a lazy nigger thing to do"? (etc.)
I know, I know, some of your best friends are homosexual jews of african descent... right...
Think about it. If you knew enough to plead "no offense" then you knew from the get-go that there was no non-offensive reading likely by your audience.
Now, rather than put some "weeping liberal" (8-) plea here, I just thought I point something out to you...
Using that kind of language will cost you money.
Let's say that you are the perfect applicant for a job, but lets also say that you have allowed yourself to develop these habbits of speach over the course of your lifetime. The patterns of speach and thought will, eventually, become habbits of speach and thought. When the interviewer hears you say "totally gay" or "yo dog" or whatever, he will either think you are ignorant and decided to cut the salary offer because you won't know you're being had on the cheap, or decide you are likely to let that sort of thing slip in front of a customer, and decide that you really aren't the most qualified applicant after all.
You should put the price schedule in your head:
(cost for each utterance) $50 ending a sentence in "yo". $100 placing two or more "yo"s next to eachother when not discussing a child's toy. $75 "totally gay" $200 "nigger" $175 "heeb" or "jew boy" (and so forth...)
Each time you use any of the above, mentally deduct the dollar amount from your lifetime earnings.
It's not like there is actually a guy standing behind you who is going to ticket you, but each usage increases the likelyhood that you will use the term at an ill-advised later moment and lose a substantial finincial position or opportunity.
This is part of my theory of "the instantaneously self-punishing nature of life."... but no offense taken... 8-)
No really, every single company that makes anything that proports to "remember" anything what-so-ever "can be used" to "remember" a copy of a copyrighted work.
Every single industry on the planet should be against these measures, including the artists.
Relying on "the governments" or "the courts" to "get around to deciding where the draw the line" on *any* matter (as a founding assumption of proposing the mater in the first place) should be punishable by death.
At first reading this may sound like a Troll, or on overstating the case, but if you follow the bouncing dollar bill, you will see that these "statements of vision disguised as law" are simply vast resivours of entropy trying to suck the life (money, rights, and intellegence) out of our culture.
[I guess I am ranting, but what exactly *will* it take to get the people, any people, to listen?]
The problem with the theory that acquiring patents protects one from "IP Companies" is that those IP Extorsionists don't actually make a product. With no product, there is nothing to leverage another protective patent against.
That is, having a patent portfolio to throw back in someone's face lets, say IBM and Microsoft or Sun to face eachother down because the "cross licensing" factor.
But "I am violating your patent while you violate mine, so lets do a deal" breaks down utterly when "the other party" doesn't have a product. That is, when Eolas (sp?) beat up Microsoft over patents, Eolas had the extreme advantage of having no product to "defend" in the exchange-of-fire. Eolas' own incompetence and lack of venture made them immune to counter-patent argument.
The reason that an IP Holding Company is such a disaster for us (technologists) as a comercial whole is that we have no leverage to push back against.
An IP holding company has no product, no market, vanishingly little capital, and no need of "good will in the marketplace". In short they are as smooth as a bowling-ball.
It is like an aircraft carrier (IBM with some Product) comming up against bombardment from space via aimed asteroid (an IP Holding Company.) There is nothing else to fire back against so all the guns in the world are of no use. You are left with only mobility and prayer. So small companies that can turn on a dime are less useful targets to an IP company because they are harder to hit and less satisfying to sink.
I would think that every software company everywhere would be desperate to remove software patentability.
After all, I could be nearly destitute, and a manufacturer of nothing, and hold a patent. Then I just need to hire a lawyer on spec to sue the IBMs of the world. They can't hurt me with thier patents (since I have no product) and I can soak them for money, all "at risk" with my lawyer on spec.
Software Patents in the hands of IP holding companies is asking for doom.
Were all software patents voided this very instant, with none to follow, every company on the planet would be instantly in a better possition despite the "loss of IP". Sure, they would "lose" the money they had already spent, and small upstarts could challenge their software, but it would be like "instantly" removing all the nuclear weapons all at once as if by magic.
The disarmament would be simultaneous and complete, and would free up assets and reduce risks to zero on a whole front of contention.
But most companies are too dumb to see that, and most "IP Lawyers" would lose their livelyhood. So it will never happen.
But until it does happen, any company can be soaked for Patent Extortion by any tiny patent held by a non-entity.
This is what I like to think of as "the instantanious, self-punishing nature of life". They feel that they *must* have this stone around their necks, and they keep trying to make the stone heavier and then they don't understand why they are so tired all the time.
By *FANALLY* doing what Clinton told him to do, Bush got the attack rate back down to where Clinton had it and, being the brain that he is, he only had to trash the economy, lie to congress and the people, dismantle the constitution, and EXPORT the American CASUALTIES to forign soil (a soil from which no Terrorisim was headed towards America by any stretch of the truth) to avenge his father's incompetent failure to handle Sadam back when there was reason to do so.
With this amazing and honest intellect in charge, The United States of America's problems will be over soon... But the problems will just be starting for The Imperium of the Right Christian Prophet of North America...
ODD... I seem to remember a very WHITE person bombing us... I think his name was McVeigh (sp?)
This all puts me in mind of the aphroisim about history repeating itself when we fail to learn from it, and I dare-say remembering is a big part of learning.
On September 11 I lost a bet. I bet my roommate that it was a melitia group protesting "The Military Industrial Complex." I figured I'd lose though, because WHITE Terroritst rarely consider the suicide aproach... WHITE Terrorists are the set-and-forget bomber types.
...that or they have been apointed by the Supreme Court of the U.S. to replace the duly elected President... (ok, that's a cheap shot, but the homilies are flying here and I am about to try to make a different point. 8-)
Before you flame go ahead and remember a little history... The term "terrorisim" stems from the means used by a government for controlling its OWN population. (No really, look up "the reign of terror" sometime.)
So some strangers blew up some buildings and, for the most part, huge sections of the world (the U.S. in particular) seem to have decided that history is meaningless and it is better to live in a condition of immediate and imaginary safety instead of a responsable and well-informed liberty.
I am amused that you go on to quote Nicholson's character in A few Good Men... I guess you missed the point of the movie. You know, the one where he was a bad person who did wrong things and got someone killed? Or the part where all the good little supporting drones almost let him get away with it because it is bad to question authority even when you know it is doing a wrong thing.
It shouldn't be "My Country Right or Wrong" it should be "My Country, and I'll make it Right when it is Wrong because it's MY COUNTRY and I take Responsibility for my PROPERTY when it HARMS OTHERS."
Capitulating blindly with the US government when it is fook-all off it's nut and being run by a wanker is the *LEAST* patriotic thing an "American" can do...
God, stop this crazy planet, I want to get off and go somewhere with intellegent life...
I'd presume that the "area" the car drives is not the overall width of the car (10 feet) swept out over the path of travel, it is more likely the cumulative width of the tire's contact-patch on the ground (so like about a foot) because that contact-patch represents the area communication, that is the area of energy transfer from the drive system of the machine to its environment.
Were it not this way, if I were to put a cross-beam across the roof of the car that spread the car's width to 20 feet, it would not produce a deterministic halving of the actual millage.
So going from about ten feet to about a foot, your caluclation results in a applicable increase in milage from 1.55 to 15.5 miles to the gallon.
That is keeping with the observations I have made of *MY* Ford F-150. So 40 hectares to the hoggs head is spot on for my truck.
Clearly the anticeedent poster has bought a street truck or middling to large SUV...
You scoff about the Administrator thing, but you are wrong too.
1) Windows is nearly unusable as a "regular user".
2) Those of us who have been dragooned into service as psudo or actual network adminstrators are forced, day and night, to use a Windows login which is a "group member" of some groups that make "Machine Administrator" seem a laughable and weak status.
Even as I speak (type? 8-) here at my job, I am logged into our corporate network using my normal daily account. I am required to be doing this. As a member of the domain administrator group, I can go to "My Network Places" (god save me from these cutsie names) and find any computer on the corporate network, and add actions to the schedulers for *those* *remote* *computers*.
Imagine it, if my "normal" "non administrator" session were compromised; if I were foolsh enough to use IE (which I must from time to time becaus of MS, but which I avoid when possible); if I were foolish enough to log into some other, pre-compromised machine on our network; the exploit would only need to pursue my "normal" permissions to share-out a folder and then schedule the contents of that folder to run "later" on every other machine on the network. And so on...
Yes, I have yet to see an exploit for this in the wild; it is none the less a gaping hole inherent in the design. But I suspect that the only reason I have not is that script-kiddie haxors are unimaginative and overtly linear lusers.
On my linux boxes I "always" log in as a regular user and then promote myself when necessary. In fact nobody can directly log in as root on any of these boxes, even from the console.
In Windows, in my corporate setting, I have no choce but to be more-than-god from each machine I use and so treat the systems as if I am a big security hole.
Then again, what about the other four guys with Domain Admin? I know at least two of them do stupid and exploitable things every day.
It's just dumb.
Good thing the company decided to take the corporate DHCP and DNS off of my "vlunerable" linux box and put it safely into MS Active Directory where it can be safe and happy...
Yea... right... the problem is people logging in as "Administrator".../sigh
1) one-or-more voting stations. 2) one scanner-fed lock-box "ballot box". 3) one computer conected to ballot box. 4) one lable/sticker printer attached to the ballot box computer. 5) one scanner-fed lock-box "errata box". 6) one computer conneced to errata box. 7) one or more trained poll staffers.
By "scanner fed" I mean a contraption such that an optical scanner reads a document and, after all the barcodes are scanned, if they make sense, the physical document prodeeds to the fed device.
-- ALL Printers (etc) print on a "reasonably heavy" card stock.
-- The errata bin scanner, unlike all the other scanners, will not reject/return an unscannable document. The Errata box also has a slot for truly mangled debris sheets. This errata bin should score or deface the ballots so inserted (have a roller splash "void" over their face etc.)
-- There is no "network", wireless or otherwise, connecting the voting stations to anything.
How voting procedes:
1) before polls open the voting system is used to print-up a bunch of "blank" ballots that have psudo-random or sequenced or whatever "GUIDS" and the big black words "this side down" in several languages, and these printed blanks are set up in bins. Blank ballots are printed at (any of) the voting stations using an administrative key or there could be a dedicated blank printer.
2) The voter aproaches the human who checks the voters ID etc.
3) The voter the selects, at random, one of the "blank" ballots and takes it to a voting station.
4) The voter scan-and-shred(s) the "blank" ballot to start the touch-screen process.
5) The voter navigates the touch-screen process in the language of their choice.
6) When the voter selects "done voting" the card-stock printer prints a completed ballot with (JUST) the name-office or initiative-selection pairs (e.g. President: Bob, or Issue 167: NO) selected by the voter for the issues he wishes vote, the GUID from the "blank" original, an encoded barcode/dotcode splash containing all the votes in machine readable form, the GUID, the "voting station serial number", the "voting station voter-session sequence number" and a checksum.
7) The voter then leaves the voting station.
8) The voter visually reviews their ballot print-out.
9) The voter may then either proceed to the ballot box or back into any voting station to ammend their vote via a scan-and-shred operation.
9a) If the voter elects to change their vote, they return to any voting station and, do the scan-and-shred operation as in step 3, but the station has read the barcode/dotcode splash and brought up what it read from the splash as the reviewable and changable defaults. The voter carries on.
9b) If the voter elects to cast his ballot, he takes it to the ballot box, where it is scanned and the ballot is stored in the lock-box.
10) The voter is given an "I voted" sticker with an MD5 (etc) checksum of their ballot printed on it as produced/recorded by the ballot-box.
-- Any ballot that is cast into the ballot box should be scored (e.g. roller stamped) with a scanner-cookie barcode that would make the voter stations reject it so that somone couldn't just open the box with a key/pry-bar and take the ballots over to a voter station, and edit them.
-- The ballot box would reject scanning/honoring a duplicate GUID, preventing all sorts of tampering/stuffing schemes.
-- A successful post-casting edit attack would be revealed by the mismatch of the nubmer of ballots in the box (physically counted) compared to the number scanned by the box, so there is a check-and-balance.
-- Any ballot that cannot be scanned by any of this equipment because of dammage (dropped, stepped on, torn, etc) or when a voter decides that something is "queer" is scan-and-stored by (or just p
... For my part, I want my peers, my community, and the government to know what I read, and what I think...
The part where you completely fail in your argument is that there is (presumably) some difference between "what you read" and "what you think"; but the aggressive archival for investigative, legal and prosecutorial purposes, of "what you read" and the certianty of guilt-by-association (whereby the state decides that what you have read is an functional indicator of what you think) is the touchstone of a colapse of liberty.
I, for one, read all sorts of descenting opinions.
I also do not suffer from the "beleives everything he reads" syndrome.
But let's be more concrete. Suppose I went down to the library and read a bunch on terrorisim, terrorist tactics, and the tretises of various "radical muslim clerics" in an effort to learn the difference between what is presented on the evening news, what I know of "real muslims", and the social relaities of those raised to the Taliban dogma.
Not being an "approved personage" for that information (e.g. not being a member of our government actively persuing intellegence for the prupose of overthrowing someone else's way of life) I would be flagged as a potential terrorist or sympathizer. Or at least there would probably be some sort of investigation launched where-in even the most tenuous of connections would secretly tar me with a dirty brush. Goodness me, that IBitOBear has, on three occasions bought gas from the Texaco insted of his normal Shell station. The proprietor of that Texico franchise once attended a movie in the company of another muslim who once found himself in the company of a cheritable orginazation that once gave money to the wrong Mosque. And within one week of each of these atypical purchases, we found it necessary to raise or lower the National Alertness Hue. We better pick that IBitOBear up for a quick overseas vacation.
Sound all far fetched? It isn't that much of a stretch. Remember that these same government people are talking about tracing associations to 32 (YES THIRTY TWO) degrees of separation.
Hell, I have less than six degrees of Kevin Bacon and I've never been in a movie. (My rommate was in "Pippy Longstocking" when he was a child. 8-). I've only got something like three or four degress to Bush, even though I have never been in politics (My Grandfather was somewhat influential in Annapolis MD politics. 8-)
How many degrees do *you* have to Bin Laden? What if he read Time Magazine every week and his neice is a Harry Potter fan? God forbid your highschool student son heard about the "Anarchist's Cookbook" and looked it up on a dare using the computer in your den.
The problem is that, with respect to terrorisim today, we are playing the newest version of "who's the Jew" that worked out so well for so many over the last 500 or so years.
And the reason that this is so dangerous, is that human beings are *NOTORIOUS* for their inability to tell the difference between "the appearance of improprietary" and "factual guilt."
So with the PATRIOT Act's abandonment of the primary requirements for liberty being lauded by people who beleive that "only terrorists need the protection of privacy", we are one good "purge" away from the next unworkable "final solution" to some vague and unstated problem.
All these "solutions" are like the number 42. Everybody has convinced themselves that 42 is *THE* *ANSWER* but nobody even remotely knows what the question might be.
Color me stupid. All the hardware I had been working on had memory SIMM slots where you put the SIMM in at an angle and then "righted it" to snap it into place.
Then one day I was asked to put a memory upgrade in a large Sun SPARC machine. This beast had vertically-insterted SIMs but that was unclear.
I reached in... spread the latches... and applied a gentle forward pressure to the SIMM...
SNAP!
The slot was ruined, and so the bank of four slots was ruined.
On closer inspection, someone else had previously done THE SAME THING to one of the slots on the other bank-of-four (and then just hid their mistake by moving the memory and reinstalling the board in the system) making that CPU card completely useless from a memory point of view.
Fourtunately we had two CPU cards and memory stacking was flexible. If that had not been the case, the project would have been down for days.
Things learned:
Always double-check the directions when moving from platform to platform.
Never hide a mistake now (especially if you have maintenance) since hiding it now may compound someone else's mistake later.
Cowardace in the face of a screw-up is not a viable option.
Sometimes I wish I could climb into the head of a moderator and pry loose an explination. The first moderator out of the shoot decided that the above was a troll...
It is an observation on the modern tendency to mistake form for function.
It was neither pejorative nor slanted. I didn't assign favorable status to one over the other in my car analogy. The moderator seems to think that one of these cars is good and the other bad, but I deleberately chose the (generic) electric town car (which apeals to the "green" among us) and the Turbo Mini (which appeals to the speed and flash among us.)
Both cars are cars I would like to own while both are small, light, and so forth.
How, exactly, was that a "-1 Troll"?
Is this yet another example of the waning intellectual rigor which abounds around us?/sigh...
The true *nix geek knows that most important and sublime of recovery sequences:
tput rmacsstty sane
After a noise burst or crash these two commands (bracketed by their line-feeds on all sides) both make the input system usable again (the "stty sane") and turn off the "alternate character set" attribute in your text window(the "tput rmacs").
Lots of people know the stty, but only the leet old-timers know the joy of tput.
Saying that two things are the same based on a movement towards similar outward apearence is specious in the extreeme and not particularly newsworthy.
In point of fact, wind-tunnel tests in the mid-to-late seventies proved that the essentially ultimate shape for a four-wheeled ground vehicle with a human-sized passenger compartment, was a sort-of convex (raised in the middle) sausage with wheels at the ordinal extremes.
In the interveening years we have seen cars steadly aproaching this shape. This does not make these cars "the same except for how they handle their windows."
There is a big difference between an electric town car and a Mini Cooper Turbo. They look a lot alike, but technologically they are completely different. And the apeal and prime target for both.
Comparasions of technology based on the outer skin is representative of a complete lack of understanding of even reason.
After all, beauty is only skin deep and is in the eye of the beholder, but ugly, it is universally understood, goes straight through to the bone. 8-)
Since every digital line (relay) used for telephone communications contains repeaters and other processors, this decision makes telephone wiretap totally legal if it is done by copying the data while it is "not in transit" within the repeater.
That is, each of your "frames" (or messages) of data are received by the repeater, packet-switched or regenerated or whatever "in the resident RAM" and then retransmitted to the next destination.
This is the same as having your email "messages" (or frames) stored on a computer before they are "retransmitted" to you via the browser, mailer agent, or whatever.
This ruling, if not challenged, essentially repeals the wiretap act for anything but a pure-analog telephone link.
The thing is, when I did the patent write up for our product here at my employer, the patent lawyer came back and said that it was too spesific. He then rewrote it to be "a good patent" taking out all the spesifity.
In the process he, a non programmer, made the document so abstruse that I could have quit the company and started my own, taken the entire body of software and a copy of the hardware plans, implemented the entire thing... without violating the patent as written...
Seriously...
Patent lawyers understand the intellectual land-grab effect and are making sure that patents *ARE NOT* spesific.
This is a deleberate technique, intended to let patents function in the greater realm of legal sap with wich to club asside the unwary.
I was invited NOT to review the next revision after I returned my markup of the document that basically said "this isn't even like the thing I have built."
The system is debased and while it is *SUPPOSED* to be all spesific and all those other things the poster above said, it is not, in fact, that way at all.
It's like comunisim, it would be a great system if it werent for the fact that humans are dishonest egocentric yahoos with no sense of social responsibility beyond their next orgasm. If people were trustworthy, you wouldn't need patents (or laws, or a "system of government") but since they are not, a system that trusts them to be is less than useless, it is anti-helpful.
See, as a friend of the RIAA and MPAA Herr John has already implemented internally at the Justice Department the iLobby database that only allows the key to a purchased Senator to be Authorized two three computers.
The FBI, the CIA, and the RNC alrealy have their coppies and if they let the.Lacky file out on a P2P basis they will have to repurchase the.Lackey at full price. They will also be subject to prosecution for Unlawfully Acting in the Public Interest, a class 1 felonly only slightly less severe than Hanging Offense of Copying "The Little Mermaid" onto disposable disk so your 3 year old won't destroy the original.
(No wonder these people think copying data is a crime, they think the Xerox(tm) machine is a deeper mistery.)
Actually I was doing the "limited theory example" thing. It is off the top of my head, but it is "easily addressable" once you (magically) have the relationships stored in the database. Once the relationships exist as things themselves, the relationship names become, essentially, adverbs.
It's kind of like the invention of lisp; you need lisp to invent lisp so there is a limping-along period. That is, we'd have to run the examples and pin down some adjcency issues like "nearer" and "further".
Consider Six Degrees of Keven Bacon...
EXPOSE 'Kevin Bacon', Name CLOSER THAN 7;// gets the list of name pairs EXPOSE CONNECTIONS('Kevin Bacon',Name) CLOSER THAN 7;// gets the list of vectors through their entities.
Still from the top of my head, you get something like:
EXPOSE thing
EXPOSE thing, thing;
EXPOSE thing , thing THROUGH relation// the chain of reference must pass through relation.
EXPOSE thing, (thing, thing, thing)// meaning each triplet must be within any sigle entity
EXPOSE thing, entity(thing, thing, thing)// triplet must come from a spesific entity
[NOTE that in the last two cases there are for "columns" returned as "entitiy" or the parentheses is a limiter not a "function"
So, to go to one of other examples in the thread:
"EXPOSE PartNumber, ZipCode" could could retrieve lots of zip codes from the same company while "EXPOSE PartNumber, ZipCode THROUGH ShippingAddresses" would retrieve just the shipped-to zip codes as would "EXPOSE PartNumber, ShipTo(ZipCode)" where "ShipTo" was an entity name (like a table, etc.)
Most of the above stuff could be done through an overlay of an existing RDBMS. Consider instead:
EXPOSE [HOW] thing RELATES [TO] thing;// produces one column
Which might go like
EXPOSE PartNumber RELATES ZipCode; PartNumber->CustomerOrder->BillingAddres s->ZipCode PartNumber->CustomerOrder->ShipTo->ZipCod e PartNumber->Supplier->CatalogOrders->ZipCode PartNumber->Wherehouse->Address->ZipCode PartNu mber->WherehouseBillingAddress->ZipCod e (and so on). (clearly this would need to be expressed as a functionally meaningful value, but said value could likely then be used as an operand.)
You end up with a meta-language of sorts.
The set is quite large and I havn't really written up my musings on the topic in any formal way, but the syntax should be fairly direct, if a tad parentheticical.
The reason that we retreated into SQL all those years ago is that we weren't really ready for namespaces and named relationshps as a technical community.
Most of the problems disapear once you relize that the simple names I have been using are, well, simple. In practice you will use something analogous to SQL's "table name" when spesifying a thing that may be otehrwise ambiguous. But rather than being a simple table_name.column_name kind of thing, it would have to chain or nest or something so that you might have domain.named_relation.*.entity or something.
EXPOSE PartNumber, ZipCode; will do the branching thing that could take you many places.
Something like: EXPOSE WITHIN OrderFulfillment PartNumber, ZipCode; would trim down the possible relationships that could be followed, on the proviso that there were a relation doman named "OrderFulfillment". As would EXPOSE PartNumber, ShippingAddress::ZipCode; or something.
I really don't have a syntax in mind. I am wandering conceptually through the fields of "what it would mean to have the relationships encoded along with the data and the shema" and what effect that would have to have on the resultant language.
In your example, you still need part_number in table2 unless you allow only one part per order ID.
The iterative join needed to then needed to print 10,000 invoices of average-of 20 parts per invoice gets too expensive to be reasonable.
It can be done, but it becomes anti-helpful.
Remember, normalization can go too far. By splitting the table you have now doubled your storage requiremet and multiplied the training, implementation, and execution costs since every operator (person or statement) and ad-hoc-query agency now needs to "know" that these two tables are needed to fulfil the "normally dense" query.
(That is, over the lifetime of the database, most orders will have been shipped so most quantity shipped datum will be present.)
With NULLs properly used, you can "SELECT COUNT(quantity_shipped)/COUNT(*)" on a single table and the answer will come from the traversal of one table or index. With two tables it would be a join.
If you actually look at the assembled wisdom of the field, you will note that you are supposed to STOP NORMALIZING when it stops helping and starts causing harm./sigh
Slashdot Mirror
No matter how many times I click refresh, the DoubleClick corporate site will not not display any banner ads, nor pop up nor pop under any X10 windows...
Oh, what did you say? "The leader in network advertising" only has tasteful advertisements on their own site?
Isn't that a tad hypocritical?
Shouldn't the people advocating annoying, bouncing, animated, rollover tripe beleive in their own products and techniques enough to use it on their own pages?
Clearly they don't, and they don't.
One could only dream of the day when all the advertisers who patronize DoubleClick ask them selves why DoubleClick doesn't use their own service to advertise their own service...
Perhaps because their customers would realize how much such techniques annoy and drive off potential clients....?
Nah, marketeers (as in mouse, not misspelling 8-) will never get wise to their own lack of wisdom.
The only way a true geek can tell if an email is a fraud is by checking where the links go. In the test all the links had been redirected, so the test results are a tad skewed if they include the false "frauds."
That is, I was fairly sure that one of the links looked an awful lot like a real eamil I had received, so I rated it as non-fraud.
All the others I rated as frauds because "if I cannot validate the link targets, it is classified as fraud no matter where it came from." So I miss-marked a couple of the "legit" ones as frauds.
Does that mean I cannot tell the difference? No, it means that I use the "if you don't know, don't trust it" rule.
Besides, at those prices, "legitamate offers" from the provider were sufficently outrageous to set off my "rippoff" detector.
If a real company wan't to charge me an unrealistic fee for a trivial service, it's a fraud email even if it *ISN'T* "phishing" 8-)
I get tired, I start making orthogonal and consistent spelling mistakes... 8-)
Robots make very poor scientists. Moving the people to the science produces better science. This is why we send manned submarines to the depths of the oceans and put guys into heat suits to risk their asses at the edges of volcanos.
Relegating the science to the robots is bad thinging, we want the peopel standing over the work for the same reasons that, robots *could* be used for brain/heart/liver/etc surgery by remote control, we perfer to have the surgeon standing over the body.
Solving habatat problems for robots is an uninteresting problem set as it is easier to build robots for the target habatat than to create a habat for a target robot.
Its about getting maximum bang for the buck. It's about how many times you get to spend each dollar.
While some *VERY MEGAR* (relative) gains can be had for in the continuance of the robotic remote probe techniques we are practicing today, the huge advances that came along with the Apollo (etc) manned programs will be lacking.
Consider this thought problem: you have twelve cubic feet and 500 pounds to work with; create a "first aid station cum doctors office" that *must* support ten people for two years.
These are the kinds of thought problems that demand the kinds of innovation that produce legendary advancements in medical, environmental, and material science. How useful would re-usable, electrically self-sterilizing bandages empregnated with a perminant catylist that acts as an anti-biotic be here on earth? Such a beast would be ideal for that medicine cabinet we are packing off to mars with "those brave souls" whomever they may be.
As a problem that challenges man to advance, and would pay off here on earth, "Pack a lander off to Mars, you have 12 cubic feet and 500 pounds" is no where near as fruitful a problem.
See, when you have the strict requirements and no second chances. When "the worst thing that can happen" is much more serious than "the really expensive remote control car isn't answering", you get concentrated motiviation.
If that motivation is aimed at making things better for people (in any context), as opposed to making things better for machines (in spesific context), you tend to produce things that make it better for any human being in every context.
Better to spend 10 trillion dollars to benefit man then to spend 1 trillion to benefit the cause of RC Racers...
For years on Solaris using POSIX Threads I did the following:
[ASIDE: You can't do this under the current pthreads linux implementation in the 2.4 kernel, but you might be able to under 2.6, I havn't checked.]
From the main thread, before you make your frist pthread_create calll, for any given signal (e.g. SIGIO and SIGALRM) install a no-op signal handler, that is one that just returns, and that is not set to resume (e.g. that will cause the errno=EINTR response. Then block/mask that signal.
Make a thread-safe list-of-structures abstraction.
Now, for each such signal make a single thread to act as the "real handler" and use sigwait in that thread to "really catch" the signal.
Other threads then register callbacks, wakeups, etc on the list-of-structures.
Different signals may take different details for optimization and accuracy. (Redistributing SIGALRM is the easiest.)
If you use C++ you can basically make the list-of-structures indistinguisable from an OS service.
I also usually make SIGUSR1 restartable and SIGUSR2 nonrestartable so that I can use pthread_kill() to forward signal indications and interrupt blocking calls.
It isn't actually all that tough to mix threads and signals and callbacks if you plan for it from the get-go.
Aparently it is hard for some people to understand that it is worth the trip even if you don't expect to have a nice native population to exploit uppon your arrival.
... valuable realestate for providing the open space we will need for our ever-expanding population
... valuable realestate which provides means to study the universe (physics etc) without the bothersome atmosphere.
... valuable realestate to occupy, if we do it _BEFOREAHND_ if the earth takes a hard punch at fractional-C (or solar orbital velocity) from a "massive" body. [If we wait for the punch, it will be too late to scramble into space.]
... will fund research in Environmental Sciences.
... will fund research in Physics.
... will fund research in Materials and Manufacturing. ...
... will fund research in topic(N+1).
The "but there is nothing there (to live on)" argument falls apart thusly:
1) There is something there. It isn't a lush tropical expanse of airable land. It is, however, "valuable realestate" for providing the raw materials we will need once we use up this planet.
2) There is
3) There is
4) There is
5) The actual pursuit will fund research and development in Medicine.
6)
7)
8)
N+1)
This debate puts me in mind of some song from the seventies (cant remember the title) that had a line like: "spent a billion dollars to go to the moon. Brought back a bag of rocks... Must be nice rocks..."
In this case, the trip itself is incredibly valuable to us here in terms of our own life and well-being.
In this case, the understanding of habitat necessary to create *artifical* habitat could revolutionize our own habatat here on earth (notice the repeating word) and coudl lead to ways to sustain and repair the one we are shitting all over down here.
The argument against seems to be "if there are no native inhabitants there to exploit, and the streets of the cities of those primitives are not lined with gold, we might as well forget it."
After all, you seem to say, if its work and the payoff isn't obvious in banannas and slaves to pick them, we might as well stay home.
(Yes, that last is a troll-like and unfair generalization of your position; but if you get to generalize away all the benefits of the pursuit because the travelers will not easily survive shipwreck; then I get to generalize *in* what you might demand of the trip in order to have the trip seem worthwile. 8-)
There is no "no offense" verion of "that is totally gay". If you are going to be a biggot or a jackass, *OWN* the jackassary... 8-)
... but no offense taken... 8-)
Would you also dare:
"No offense, that is such a lying jew tactic"?
"No offense, but what a lazy nigger thing to do"?
(etc.)
I know, I know, some of your best friends are homosexual jews of african descent... right...
Think about it. If you knew enough to plead "no offense" then you knew from the get-go that there was no non-offensive reading likely by your audience.
Now, rather than put some "weeping liberal" (8-) plea here, I just thought I point something out to you...
Using that kind of language will cost you money.
Let's say that you are the perfect applicant for a job, but lets also say that you have allowed yourself to develop these habbits of speach over the course of your lifetime. The patterns of speach and thought will, eventually, become habbits of speach and thought. When the interviewer hears you say "totally gay" or "yo dog" or whatever, he will either think you are ignorant and decided to cut the salary offer because you won't know you're being had on the cheap, or decide you are likely to let that sort of thing slip in front of a customer, and decide that you really aren't the most qualified applicant after all.
You should put the price schedule in your head:
(cost for each utterance)
$50 ending a sentence in "yo".
$100 placing two or more "yo"s next to eachother when not discussing a child's toy.
$75 "totally gay"
$200 "nigger"
$175 "heeb" or "jew boy"
(and so forth...)
Each time you use any of the above, mentally deduct the dollar amount from your lifetime earnings.
It's not like there is actually a guy standing behind you who is going to ticket you, but each usage increases the likelyhood that you will use the term at an ill-advised later moment and lose a substantial finincial position or opportunity.
This is part of my theory of "the instantaneously self-punishing nature of life."
No really, every single company that makes anything that proports to "remember" anything what-so-ever "can be used" to "remember" a copy of a copyrighted work.
Every single industry on the planet should be against these measures, including the artists.
Relying on "the governments" or "the courts" to "get around to deciding where the draw the line" on *any* matter (as a founding assumption of proposing the mater in the first place) should be punishable by death.
At first reading this may sound like a Troll, or on overstating the case, but if you follow the bouncing dollar bill, you will see that these "statements of vision disguised as law" are simply vast resivours of entropy trying to suck the life (money, rights, and intellegence) out of our culture.
[I guess I am ranting, but what exactly *will* it take to get the people, any people, to listen?]
The problem with the theory that acquiring patents protects one from "IP Companies" is that those IP Extorsionists don't actually make a product. With no product, there is nothing to leverage another protective patent against.
That is, having a patent portfolio to throw back in someone's face lets, say IBM and Microsoft or Sun to face eachother down because the "cross licensing" factor.
But "I am violating your patent while you violate mine, so lets do a deal" breaks down utterly when "the other party" doesn't have a product. That is, when Eolas (sp?) beat up Microsoft over patents, Eolas had the extreme advantage of having no product to "defend" in the exchange-of-fire. Eolas' own incompetence and lack of venture made them immune to counter-patent argument.
The reason that an IP Holding Company is such a disaster for us (technologists) as a comercial whole is that we have no leverage to push back against.
An IP holding company has no product, no market, vanishingly little capital, and no need of "good will in the marketplace". In short they are as smooth as a bowling-ball.
It is like an aircraft carrier (IBM with some Product) comming up against bombardment from space via aimed asteroid (an IP Holding Company.) There is nothing else to fire back against so all the guns in the world are of no use. You are left with only mobility and prayer. So small companies that can turn on a dime are less useful targets to an IP company because they are harder to hit and less satisfying to sink.
I would think that every software company everywhere would be desperate to remove software patentability.
After all, I could be nearly destitute, and a manufacturer of nothing, and hold a patent. Then I just need to hire a lawyer on spec to sue the IBMs of the world. They can't hurt me with thier patents (since I have no product) and I can soak them for money, all "at risk" with my lawyer on spec.
Software Patents in the hands of IP holding companies is asking for doom.
Were all software patents voided this very instant, with none to follow, every company on the planet would be instantly in a better possition despite the "loss of IP". Sure, they would "lose" the money they had already spent, and small upstarts could challenge their software, but it would be like "instantly" removing all the nuclear weapons all at once as if by magic.
The disarmament would be simultaneous and complete, and would free up assets and reduce risks to zero on a whole front of contention.
But most companies are too dumb to see that, and most "IP Lawyers" would lose their livelyhood. So it will never happen.
But until it does happen, any company can be soaked for Patent Extortion by any tiny patent held by a non-entity.
This is what I like to think of as "the instantanious, self-punishing nature of life". They feel that they *must* have this stone around their necks, and they keep trying to make the stone heavier and then they don't understand why they are so tired all the time.
By *FANALLY* doing what Clinton told him to do, Bush got the attack rate back down to where Clinton had it and, being the brain that he is, he only had to trash the economy, lie to congress and the people, dismantle the constitution, and EXPORT the American CASUALTIES to forign soil (a soil from which no Terrorisim was headed towards America by any stretch of the truth) to avenge his father's incompetent failure to handle Sadam back when there was reason to do so.
With this amazing and honest intellect in charge, The United States of America's problems will be over soon... But the problems will just be starting for The Imperium of the Right Christian Prophet of North America...
Clod...
ODD... I seem to remember a very WHITE person bombing us... I think his name was McVeigh (sp?)
This all puts me in mind of the aphroisim about history repeating itself when we fail to learn from it, and I dare-say remembering is a big part of learning.
On September 11 I lost a bet. I bet my roommate that it was a melitia group protesting "The Military Industrial Complex." I figured I'd lose though, because WHITE Terroritst rarely consider the suicide aproach... WHITE Terrorists are the set-and-forget bomber types.
...that or they have been apointed by the Supreme Court of the U.S. to replace the duly elected President... (ok, that's a cheap shot, but the homilies are flying here and I am about to try to make a different point. 8-)
Before you flame go ahead and remember a little history... The term "terrorisim" stems from the means used by a government for controlling its OWN population. (No really, look up "the reign of terror" sometime.)
So some strangers blew up some buildings and, for the most part, huge sections of the world (the U.S. in particular) seem to have decided that history is meaningless and it is better to live in a condition of immediate and imaginary safety instead of a responsable and well-informed liberty.
I am amused that you go on to quote Nicholson's character in A few Good Men... I guess you missed the point of the movie. You know, the one where he was a bad person who did wrong things and got someone killed? Or the part where all the good little supporting drones almost let him get away with it because it is bad to question authority even when you know it is doing a wrong thing.
It shouldn't be "My Country Right or Wrong" it should be "My Country, and I'll make it Right when it is Wrong because it's MY COUNTRY and I take Responsibility for my PROPERTY when it HARMS OTHERS."
Capitulating blindly with the US government when it is fook-all off it's nut and being run by a wanker is the *LEAST* patriotic thing an "American" can do...
God, stop this crazy planet, I want to get off and go somewhere with intellegent life...
I'd presume that the "area" the car drives is not the overall width of the car (10 feet) swept out over the path of travel, it is more likely the cumulative width of the tire's contact-patch on the ground (so like about a foot) because that contact-patch represents the area communication, that is the area of energy transfer from the drive system of the machine to its environment.
Were it not this way, if I were to put a cross-beam across the roof of the car that spread the car's width to 20 feet, it would not produce a deterministic halving of the actual millage.
So going from about ten feet to about a foot, your caluclation results in a applicable increase in milage from 1.55 to 15.5 miles to the gallon.
That is keeping with the observations I have made of *MY* Ford F-150. So 40 hectares to the hoggs head is spot on for my truck.
Clearly the anticeedent poster has bought a street truck or middling to large SUV...
BLAMM == Blind Loving Advocacy in Media and Marketing.
PUFF == Partisan Usability Fact Filtration
You scoff about the Administrator thing, but you are wrong too.
/sigh
1) Windows is nearly unusable as a "regular user".
2) Those of us who have been dragooned into service as psudo or actual network adminstrators are forced, day and night, to use a Windows login which is a "group member" of some groups that make "Machine Administrator" seem a laughable and weak status.
Even as I speak (type? 8-) here at my job, I am logged into our corporate network using my normal daily account. I am required to be doing this. As a member of the domain administrator group, I can go to "My Network Places" (god save me from these cutsie names) and find any computer on the corporate network, and add actions to the schedulers for *those* *remote* *computers*.
Imagine it, if my "normal" "non administrator" session were compromised; if I were foolsh enough to use IE (which I must from time to time becaus of MS, but which I avoid when possible); if I were foolish enough to log into some other, pre-compromised machine on our network; the exploit would only need to pursue my "normal" permissions to share-out a folder and then schedule the contents of that folder to run "later" on every other machine on the network. And so on...
Yes, I have yet to see an exploit for this in the wild; it is none the less a gaping hole inherent in the design. But I suspect that the only reason I have not is that script-kiddie haxors are unimaginative and overtly linear lusers.
On my linux boxes I "always" log in as a regular user and then promote myself when necessary. In fact nobody can directly log in as root on any of these boxes, even from the console.
In Windows, in my corporate setting, I have no choce but to be more-than-god from each machine I use and so treat the systems as if I am a big security hole.
Then again, what about the other four guys with Domain Admin? I know at least two of them do stupid and exploitable things every day.
It's just dumb.
Good thing the company decided to take the corporate DHCP and DNS off of my "vlunerable" linux box and put it safely into MS Active Directory where it can be safe and happy...
Yea... right... the problem is people logging in as "Administrator"...
A voting station consists of:
1) touch-screen computer.
2) printer.
3) scanner-fed shredder.
Polling place consists of:
1) one-or-more voting stations.
2) one scanner-fed lock-box "ballot box".
3) one computer conected to ballot box.
4) one lable/sticker printer attached to the ballot box computer.
5) one scanner-fed lock-box "errata box".
6) one computer conneced to errata box.
7) one or more trained poll staffers.
By "scanner fed" I mean a contraption such that an optical scanner reads a document and, after all the barcodes are scanned, if they make sense, the physical document prodeeds to the fed device.
-- ALL Printers (etc) print on a "reasonably heavy" card stock.
-- The errata bin scanner, unlike all the other scanners, will not reject/return an unscannable document. The Errata box also has a slot for truly mangled debris sheets. This errata bin should score or deface the ballots so inserted (have a roller splash "void" over their face etc.)
-- There is no "network", wireless or otherwise, connecting the voting stations to anything.
How voting procedes:
1) before polls open the voting system is used to print-up a bunch of "blank" ballots that have psudo-random or sequenced or whatever "GUIDS" and the big black words "this side down" in several languages, and these printed blanks are set up in bins. Blank ballots are printed at (any of) the voting stations using an administrative key or there could be a dedicated blank printer.
2) The voter aproaches the human who checks the voters ID etc.
3) The voter the selects, at random, one of the
"blank" ballots and takes it to a voting station.
4) The voter scan-and-shred(s) the "blank" ballot to start the touch-screen process.
5) The voter navigates the touch-screen process in the language of their choice.
6) When the voter selects "done voting" the card-stock printer prints a completed ballot with (JUST) the name-office or initiative-selection pairs (e.g. President: Bob, or Issue 167: NO) selected by the voter for the issues he wishes vote, the GUID from the "blank" original, an encoded barcode/dotcode splash containing all the votes in machine readable form, the GUID, the "voting station serial number", the "voting station voter-session sequence number" and a checksum.
7) The voter then leaves the voting station.
8) The voter visually reviews their ballot print-out.
9) The voter may then either proceed to the ballot box or back into any voting station to ammend their vote via a scan-and-shred operation.
9a) If the voter elects to change their vote, they return to any voting station and, do the scan-and-shred operation as in step 3, but the station has read the barcode/dotcode splash and brought up what it read from the splash as the reviewable and changable defaults. The voter carries on.
9b) If the voter elects to cast his ballot, he takes it to the ballot box, where it is scanned and the ballot is stored in the lock-box.
10) The voter is given an "I voted" sticker with an MD5 (etc) checksum of their ballot printed on it as produced/recorded by the ballot-box.
-- Any ballot that is cast into the ballot box should be scored (e.g. roller stamped) with a scanner-cookie barcode that would make the voter stations reject it so that somone couldn't just open the box with a key/pry-bar and take the ballots over to a voter station, and edit them.
-- The ballot box would reject scanning/honoring a duplicate GUID, preventing all sorts of tampering/stuffing schemes.
-- A successful post-casting edit attack would be revealed by the mismatch of the nubmer of ballots in the box (physically counted) compared to the number scanned by the box, so there is a check-and-balance.
-- Any ballot that cannot be scanned by any of this equipment because of dammage (dropped, stepped on, torn, etc) or when a voter decides that something is "queer" is scan-and-stored by (or just p
The part where you completely fail in your argument is that there is (presumably) some difference between "what you read" and "what you think"; but the aggressive archival for investigative, legal and prosecutorial purposes, of "what you read" and the certianty of guilt-by-association (whereby the state decides that what you have read is an functional indicator of what you think) is the touchstone of a colapse of liberty.
I, for one, read all sorts of descenting opinions.
I also do not suffer from the "beleives everything he reads" syndrome.
But let's be more concrete. Suppose I went down to the library and read a bunch on terrorisim, terrorist tactics, and the tretises of various "radical muslim clerics" in an effort to learn the difference between what is presented on the evening news, what I know of "real muslims", and the social relaities of those raised to the Taliban dogma.
Not being an "approved personage" for that information (e.g. not being a member of our government actively persuing intellegence for the prupose of overthrowing someone else's way of life) I would be flagged as a potential terrorist or sympathizer. Or at least there would probably be some sort of investigation launched where-in even the most tenuous of connections would secretly tar me with a dirty brush. Goodness me, that IBitOBear has, on three occasions bought gas from the Texaco insted of his normal Shell station. The proprietor of that Texico franchise once attended a movie in the company of another muslim who once found himself in the company of a cheritable orginazation that once gave money to the wrong Mosque. And within one week of each of these atypical purchases, we found it necessary to raise or lower the National Alertness Hue. We better pick that IBitOBear up for a quick overseas vacation.
Sound all far fetched? It isn't that much of a stretch. Remember that these same government people are talking about tracing associations to 32 (YES THIRTY TWO) degrees of separation.
Hell, I have less than six degrees of Kevin Bacon and I've never been in a movie. (My rommate was in "Pippy Longstocking" when he was a child. 8-). I've only got something like three or four degress to Bush, even though I have never been in politics (My Grandfather was somewhat influential in Annapolis MD politics. 8-)
How many degrees do *you* have to Bin Laden? What if he read Time Magazine every week and his neice is a Harry Potter fan? God forbid your highschool student son heard about the "Anarchist's Cookbook" and looked it up on a dare using the computer in your den.
The problem is that, with respect to terrorisim today, we are playing the newest version of "who's the Jew" that worked out so well for so many over the last 500 or so years.
And the reason that this is so dangerous, is that human beings are *NOTORIOUS* for their inability to tell the difference between "the appearance of improprietary" and "factual guilt."
So with the PATRIOT Act's abandonment of the primary requirements for liberty being lauded by people who beleive that "only terrorists need the protection of privacy", we are one good "purge" away from the next unworkable "final solution" to some vague and unstated problem.
All these "solutions" are like the number 42. Everybody has convinced themselves that 42 is *THE* *ANSWER* but nobody even remotely knows what the question might be.
Color me stupid. All the hardware I had been working on had memory SIMM slots where you put the SIMM in at an angle and then "righted it" to snap it into place.
Then one day I was asked to put a memory upgrade in a large Sun SPARC machine. This beast had vertically-insterted SIMs but that was unclear.
I reached in... spread the latches... and applied a gentle forward pressure to the SIMM...
SNAP!
The slot was ruined, and so the bank of four slots was ruined.
On closer inspection, someone else had previously done THE SAME THING to one of the slots on the other bank-of-four (and then just hid their mistake by moving the memory and reinstalling the board in the system) making that CPU card completely useless from a memory point of view.
Fourtunately we had two CPU cards and memory stacking was flexible. If that had not been the case, the project would have been down for days.
Things learned:
Always double-check the directions when moving from platform to platform.
Never hide a mistake now (especially if you have maintenance) since hiding it now may compound someone else's mistake later.
Cowardace in the face of a screw-up is not a viable option.
Sometimes I wish I could climb into the head of a moderator and pry loose an explination. The first moderator out of the shoot decided that the above was a troll...
/sigh...
It is an observation on the modern tendency to mistake form for function.
It was neither pejorative nor slanted. I didn't assign favorable status to one over the other in my car analogy. The moderator seems to think that one of these cars is good and the other bad, but I deleberately chose the (generic) electric town car (which apeals to the "green" among us) and the Turbo Mini (which appeals to the speed and flash among us.)
Both cars are cars I would like to own while both are small, light, and so forth.
How, exactly, was that a "-1 Troll"?
Is this yet another example of the waning intellectual rigor which abounds around us?
The true *nix geek knows that most important and sublime of recovery sequences:
tput rmacsstty sane
After a noise burst or crash these two commands (bracketed by their line-feeds on all sides) both make the input system usable again (the "stty sane") and turn off the "alternate character set" attribute in your text window(the "tput rmacs").
Lots of people know the stty, but only the leet old-timers know the joy of tput.
8-)
Seriously,
Saying that two things are the same based on a movement towards similar outward apearence is specious in the extreeme and not particularly newsworthy.
In point of fact, wind-tunnel tests in the mid-to-late seventies proved that the essentially ultimate shape for a four-wheeled ground vehicle with a human-sized passenger compartment, was a sort-of convex (raised in the middle) sausage with wheels at the ordinal extremes.
In the interveening years we have seen cars steadly aproaching this shape. This does not make these cars "the same except for how they handle their windows."
There is a big difference between an electric town car and a Mini Cooper Turbo. They look a lot alike, but technologically they are completely different. And the apeal and prime target for both.
Comparasions of technology based on the outer skin is representative of a complete lack of understanding of even reason.
After all, beauty is only skin deep and is in the eye of the beholder, but ugly, it is universally understood, goes straight through to the bone. 8-)
Since every digital line (relay) used for telephone communications contains repeaters and other processors, this decision makes telephone wiretap totally legal if it is done by copying the data while it is "not in transit" within the repeater.
That is, each of your "frames" (or messages) of data are received by the repeater, packet-switched or regenerated or whatever "in the resident RAM" and then retransmitted to the next destination.
This is the same as having your email "messages" (or frames) stored on a computer before they are "retransmitted" to you via the browser, mailer agent, or whatever.
This ruling, if not challenged, essentially repeals the wiretap act for anything but a pure-analog telephone link.
The thing is, when I did the patent write up for our product here at my employer, the patent lawyer came back and said that it was too spesific. He then rewrote it to be "a good patent" taking out all the spesifity.
In the process he, a non programmer, made the document so abstruse that I could have quit the company and started my own, taken the entire body of software and a copy of the hardware plans, implemented the entire thing... without violating the patent as written...
Seriously...
Patent lawyers understand the intellectual land-grab effect and are making sure that patents *ARE NOT* spesific.
This is a deleberate technique, intended to let patents function in the greater realm of legal sap with wich to club asside the unwary.
I was invited NOT to review the next revision after I returned my markup of the document that basically said "this isn't even like the thing I have built."
The system is debased and while it is *SUPPOSED* to be all spesific and all those other things the poster above said, it is not, in fact, that way at all.
It's like comunisim, it would be a great system if it werent for the fact that humans are dishonest egocentric yahoos with no sense of social responsibility beyond their next orgasm. If people were trustworthy, you wouldn't need patents (or laws, or a "system of government") but since they are not, a system that trusts them to be is less than useless, it is anti-helpful.
See, as a friend of the RIAA and MPAA Herr John has already implemented internally at the Justice Department the iLobby database that only allows the key to a purchased Senator to be Authorized two three computers.
.Lacky file out on a P2P basis they will have to repurchase the .Lackey at full price. They will also be subject to prosecution for Unlawfully Acting in the Public Interest, a class 1 felonly only slightly less severe than Hanging Offense of Copying "The Little Mermaid" onto disposable disk so your 3 year old won't destroy the original.
The FBI, the CIA, and the RNC alrealy have their coppies and if they let the
(No wonder these people think copying data is a crime, they think the Xerox(tm) machine is a deeper mistery.)
Actually I was doing the "limited theory example" thing. It is off the top of my head, but it is "easily addressable" once you (magically) have the relationships stored in the database. Once the relationships exist as things themselves, the relationship names become, essentially, adverbs.
// gets the list of name pairs // gets the list of vectors through their entities.
// the chain of reference must pass through relation.
// meaning each triplet must be within any sigle entity
// triplet must come from a spesific entity
// produces one column
s s->ZipCode u mber->WherehouseBillingAddress->ZipCod e
It's kind of like the invention of lisp; you need lisp to invent lisp so there is a limping-along period. That is, we'd have to run the examples and pin down some adjcency issues like "nearer" and "further".
Consider Six Degrees of Keven Bacon...
EXPOSE 'Kevin Bacon', Name CLOSER THAN 7;
EXPOSE CONNECTIONS('Kevin Bacon',Name) CLOSER THAN 7;
Still from the top of my head, you get something like:
EXPOSE thing
EXPOSE thing, thing;
EXPOSE thing , thing THROUGH relation
EXPOSE thing, (thing, thing, thing)
EXPOSE thing, entity(thing, thing, thing)
[NOTE that in the last two cases there are for "columns" returned as "entitiy" or the parentheses is a limiter not a "function"
So, to go to one of other examples in the thread:
"EXPOSE PartNumber, ZipCode" could could retrieve lots of zip codes from the same company while "EXPOSE PartNumber, ZipCode THROUGH ShippingAddresses" would retrieve just the shipped-to zip codes as would "EXPOSE PartNumber, ShipTo(ZipCode)" where "ShipTo" was an entity name (like a table, etc.)
Most of the above stuff could be done through an overlay of an existing RDBMS. Consider instead:
EXPOSE [HOW] thing RELATES [TO] thing;
Which might go like
EXPOSE PartNumber RELATES ZipCode;
PartNumber->CustomerOrder->BillingAddre
PartNumber->CustomerOrder->ShipTo->ZipCod e
PartNumber->Supplier->CatalogOrders->ZipCode
PartNumber->Wherehouse->Address->ZipCode
PartN
(and so on).
(clearly this would need to be expressed as a functionally meaningful value, but said value could likely then be used as an operand.)
You end up with a meta-language of sorts.
The set is quite large and I havn't really written up my musings on the topic in any formal way, but the syntax should be fairly direct, if a tad parentheticical.
The reason that we retreated into SQL all those years ago is that we weren't really ready for namespaces and named relationshps as a technical community.
Most of the problems disapear once you relize that the simple names I have been using are, well, simple. In practice you will use something analogous to SQL's "table name" when spesifying a thing that may be otehrwise ambiguous. But rather than being a simple table_name.column_name kind of thing, it would have to chain or nest or something so that you might have domain.named_relation.*.entity or something.
EXPOSE PartNumber, ZipCode; will do the branching thing that could take you many places.
Something like:
EXPOSE WITHIN OrderFulfillment PartNumber, ZipCode; would trim down the possible relationships that could be followed, on the proviso that there were a relation doman named "OrderFulfillment". As would EXPOSE PartNumber, ShippingAddress::ZipCode; or something.
I really don't have a syntax in mind. I am wandering conceptually through the fields of "what it would mean to have the relationships encoded along with the data and the shema" and what effect that would have to have on the resultant language.
Do your own... it's fun... 8-)
In your example, you still need part_number in table2 unless you allow only one part per order ID.
/sigh
The iterative join needed to then needed to print 10,000 invoices of average-of 20 parts per invoice gets too expensive to be reasonable.
It can be done, but it becomes anti-helpful.
Remember, normalization can go too far. By splitting the table you have now doubled your storage requiremet and multiplied the training, implementation, and execution costs since every operator (person or statement) and ad-hoc-query agency now needs to "know" that these two tables are needed to fulfil the "normally dense" query.
(That is, over the lifetime of the database, most orders will have been shipped so most quantity shipped datum will be present.)
With NULLs properly used, you can "SELECT COUNT(quantity_shipped)/COUNT(*)" on a single table and the answer will come from the traversal of one table or index. With two tables it would be a join.
If you actually look at the assembled wisdom of the field, you will note that you are supposed to STOP NORMALIZING when it stops helping and starts causing harm.