A bit bitter what? He was talking about Apartheid South Africa, old government, not the new one who think anything to do with standards or hard work is some kind of evil neo-colonialist racist plot.
The anti-aircraft gun that went awry was because the the current troops were too lazy/incompetent to set any physical safety stops on the gun so when it suffered a mechanical failure it got to make like it was owned by skynet.
As for the nuke(s) they still managed to build them which is more than most the 3rd world have managed including Iran 20+ years later.
that no one who has thought things through wants to "rent" software?..., but in my mind, they're real show stoppers.
Um, you have your homepage at dreamhost. Which basically means you are renting a copy of apache and some disk space from them. Do you do use online banking and does the bank charge you a service fee, or do you get less interest in a moneymarket account somewhere else? Yep you are renting again.
Its a value call, what are the risks vs the benefits?
Doesn't seem to be much of a show stopper for you.
This is the same Interpol whose previous president has some pretty serious organized crime connections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Selebi). I think its more about the contracts that can be awarded for maintaining the system than about actually catching anyone important.
Then pump the CO2 through a series of bioreactors to pump up the growth of algae for biodiesel. That way you get the money from the carbon credits and you can resell whatever yield you can get out of the algae.
Thats why child porn is so great for false accusations. You accuse someone of it and its almost impossible to prove your innocence.
If you are feeling brave or you live in a slightly more chilled country search P2P for the R Kelly child porn video. She doesn't look or act even slightly underage but to anyone who hasn't seen it R Kelly is instantly an evil child molester and pornographer.
Itunes used to sell DRM only songs, but it never stopped the IPOD from taking off. Just get a non drm copy of the doc. Now you have the doc and your friend can have his own copy of the doc. Even better than dead-tree. Besides if the kindle becomes even slightly popular there will be a crack for it.
Right now postgresql's take up rate is so low that the economies of scale aren't there to make it worth while.
You wouldn't notice it from reading slashdot but postgresql supporters are like Ruby on Rails or Ron Paul supporters. A few extremely vocal supporters but no real grass roots support.
As long as the primary marketing strategy of postgres is "mysql is bad use us instead" they aren't going to gain any major market share. The benefits of sticking with a widely used standard outweigh the relatively minor benefits of moving.
Speaking as the owner of a mid-size hosting company, I'd say yes definitely. We're whores, we'll sell whatever the customers want.
Right now there's zero demand for postgresql, I've got thousands and thousands of mysql sites but only a handful of postgresql ones. The instant that starts to change I'll start including postgresql in the entry level packages because I know my competitors be will too.
The inquest hasn't even started properly so no one has a clue what really happened.
There have been reports that this was the first live fire exercise for a lot of the soldiers also current South African army has a reputation for being more than a little incompetent. The old South African army were a bunch of psycho racists, but were very good at their jobs, not surprisingly a huge number of senior people were pushed out when the government changed and the organizational knowledge about why safety is a good thing has been destroyed by a group of politicians who think that standards are a racist colonial idea.
I also don't understand why the demand for ebook readers aren't higher. I'm going to get one as soon as they arrive in my country (they are still too new and expensive for me to take the risk importing from the states).
I think that long term epaper readers will really boost the publishing industry. Lower costs means lower prices = more sales= more incentive to publish more books. Also the barrier to publishing a book will plummet which means more books will get published.
As much as I love dead tree books, I'll happily switch to ebooks if they are cheaper and I can lie in bed or on a hammock in the middle of the bush and still read. In my day job I'm forever using reference books which are a pain to use in ebook format if they take up the same screen space that I'm busy working on, and dead tree can REALLY waste desktop space. The size of the actual reader isn't that critical, I even think the bigger the screen the better for the most part. No one complains about the size of the latest chunky bestseller or the size of a reference book.
I've been using PowerDNS to manage several thousand domains for almost 3 years and its been the best thing I ever did. Besides being GPL it has an SQL backend so doing things like changing the TTL for 300 domains takes a few seconds instead of the slog or scripting nightmare with BIND. I use mysql replication to keep my slaves uptodate which is also flawless. Load average handling around 150 queries a second is less than 1%
There is a postgres backend for it as well although I have never tried it.
Social medicine can really backfire as well. I've heard scary stories about patients in the UK waiting months for treatment of non life threatening but otherwise unpleasant medical conditions. Here in South Africa if I needed any serious operation I could probably get it done for free at a state hospital but my chances of dying of septicemia would be high. Last year several babies on life support died when the power failed and the generator didn't start (was out of fuel) and the nurses were too lazy to check on the babies.
My personal feeling is that the best solution would be to heavily subsidize the costs of med school. It would take several years but the supply and demand would drive down prices. Combine that with some attractive financing (i.e assisted but NOT free ) from the state for medical equipment purchases and things would improve.
Free is great for software but its not so great for services.
Its been a while since I've worked heavily with postgres so I can't comment on the speed improvements but on Fedora 6 running postgresql 8.1 only local tcp/ip connections are enabled by default (no -i switch for the postmaster process) and autovacuum is still off by default. The performance in postgres can be really bad with out regular use of vacuum. I know a competent admin can fix all of that easily but your average newbie cannot. I manage a web hosting business with several thousand customers and my experience and every other hosting owner I've ever spoken to is that the demand for postgres is almost zero (less than 1 in 1000 customers).
Please understand that I am a whore and I will sell what ever my customers want but right now almost none of them want postgres. If the postgres devs spent more time improving the friendliness of their system and less time shouting down anyone offering constructive criticism they might start clawing back some market share.
Yep it was really irritating. A lot like the Postgres users who kept claiming the next version of their server was going to be really fast.
In the end the postgres crowd have a right to be upset. They could have been the major player for open databases but their devs were too arrogant to listen to their users and design it to be friendly.
For all its faults mysql is trivial to install and works out of the box for most applications. Last time I looked the default install for postgresql still seemed to be tuned as though it would never have to handle more than a handful of users. Stored procedures and TCP/IP are off by default and the auto vacuum thing needs to be set up manually. Then don't forget that while the postgres query parser does more error checking that mysql its error messages are incredibly cryptic so its MUCH hard to trouble shoot.
Your average newbie takes one looks at it, gives up and moves to mysql. When that newbie finally grows up he has too much time invested in mysql to be bothered learning the intricacies of postgres. Every extra feature that mysql adds is one less reason for anyone to try postgres.
Postgres is a better DB once its setup and tuned properly but considering its usability issues and that mysql users probably out number postgres users a thousand to 1 or more I think mysql is always going to be the number one opensource DB.
I'm with you on that. $2000 would be a bit rich for my blood but I would definitly spend a lot. I'd even buy that sony libre thingy if it ever came to my country. I have boxes of paperbacks at home that I would love to be able to give up on.
When MP3 players first started to come out MP3s were something only geeks had on their computers. Right now most people in any kind of tech job have a few ebooks or help files on their PCs that would be perfect on an ereader.
I think if there was a usable ebook reader it wouldn't take more than 6 months for word of mouth to make readers to start spreading everywhere, and by that time there will be lots of novels for sale all over the web.
you have to explicitly indicate if you want to access global variables from inside a function
I agree and it irritates me daily too, but its still no reason to condemn the language any more than pythons use of whitespace to delimit blocks is a reason to condemn it.
My day job is running an ISP with several thousand PHP/Mysql customers. Personally I've never seen the crashes you mentioned and we have some fairly intensive service monitoring in place. The security vulnerablilities are a problem but I've seen just as many SQL injection attacks under ASP and perl based CGI used to be notorious for its holes. As long as programmers are lazy and trust user input there are going to be problems. Those problems are already mostly solved under PHP if you turn off register_globals, never touch eval and use a DB library like ADODB that allows placeholders in SQL queries.
The thing with PHP and mysql is that it is so scalable. It can handle anything from a one page contact form to a multi server site like wikipedia. In the real world no one actually cares about the best or perfect, they want easy and "good enough". DBs like postgresql lost out because they were so obsessed about being academically perfect they forgot to make things easy for their users.
For simple things, I can live with PHP's warts, but when writing larger or more complex applications, I wish for a Real programming language.
I find all the object enhancements in PHP5 like the autoload function make it pretty good for larger applications. Whats your idea of a Real programming language thats widely supported?
This kind of stuff comes up on slashdot all the time, but I've yet to see any justification for it. PHP might not be that fast or stable under windows but under *nix it's very fast and stable. Mysql might not be the right choice for a fortune 500 financial system but its fast and stable for most web apps. Have you ever bothered to see who actually uses it?
Hmm. Lets see.... Mysql's website claims to have the following companies on board del.icio.us digg flickr wikipedia technorati trulia yahoo and craigslist. Also last time I checked slashdot was also using mysql, and just off the top of my head wikipedia and flickr are both PHP sites.
Except not really because mysql now have SAP DB which is the backend for their maxdb product which is a _LOT_ better than anything SleepyCat ever produced.
My guess is that as soon as SleepyCat becomes a problem they will just merge the maxdb code into the standard mysql database and probably the only reason they haven't yet is that they are making too much money supporting all SAP customers.
PHP catches a lot of flack because it is by far the most popular language out there for building websites which offends the crowd who want work with a language only the ubergeeks can use.
The thing is that a clueless newbie can be productive in less than 2 weeks with PHP (even though looking at his code will make your eyes bleed). While for more experienced programmers its very easy to use things like the object features in PHP5 combined with template tools like smarty and db libraries like ADODB to create stable, maintainable and fast sites. For most small to medium business owners it's a really good choice because the openness helps keep down development costs and if one developer doesn't deliver its easy to find another who can.
When it comes to security the real truth is that it doesn't matter what language you use, if you don't check the user input, you WILL be sorry. Every 3 months or so I'll have a customer upload a formail.pl script from the 1990s and I'll end up having to clean up the mess once the spammers start exploiting it. Most of the security problems with PHP tend to always occur with the same small group of popular packages (phpbb, postnuke, etc.) written by people only worried about the functionality not about the security)
My bet is that within 3 months of oracle flexing their muscles with SleepyCat (remember they haven't done anything yet) Mysql will move MaxDB into the standard mysql distribution and converting will probably just be a dump and reload operation. Why do you think Mysql has suddenly developed stored-procedures, view, and sub queries in such a short period of time?
MaxDB is the SAP database and SAP are investors in Mysql AB.
If I used forum posts as any proxy, it would look like MySQL is dominant.
In the webhosting world that is the understatement of the year. In my business I have a little over 1000 mysql clients and all of 3 postgresql clients. I've been advertising Postgres along side mysql for 2 years now. Its not worth the space or staff training costs.
I think the problem was that postgres was always much more complicated to set up and it used to have some pretty serious performance problems in the real world. It was also much harder for a beginner to learn with, error messages like: syntax error near "'" on a 20 line create statement dont help either.
I think too many people started on mysql and stayed with it as their skill improved, to the point where postgres has become an also-run, no matter what impression slashdot might give you. As for the postgres features, looking through some of my customers databases and code it looks as though a lot of them have never heard of indexes much less normalised data, stored procedures, views etc. SELECT DISTINCTS on 30000 row tables... <shudder>
I would love to hear from other people with some real world usage stats.
What about http://www.allofmp3.com/ works out to around $1.50 an album. I've been using them for about 8 months now. So far its been pretty much flawless. No matter what anyone else says its legal,the music industry has tried to shut them down several times and each time the russian authorities have refused to prosecute
The best of all is that its in MP3 format so it works with every mp3 player on the planet. The only glitch I've ever found is that sometimes (but not often) the tags aren't as good as they could be. I usually run my downloads through Easy tag before importing into my IPOD.
A group of us were in the school shooting team (back during apartheid South Africa, all army sponsored).
We had a really feeble/bored teacher who didn't keep a careful eye on us or on the ammo in the armoury so we used to steal boxes and boxes of.22 ammo. We made a set of zip guns, really crude things.
Take the.22 rip the head off with a set of pliers, pour out the powder and fill the shell up with wax. Now you have a round that is only powered by the primer.
Really fun to play war games with, except that they would leave HUGE bruises where ever they hit.
Its only now that I am older that I realize how completly stupid we were. Stolen ammo, illegal firearms. If we had been caught I think we would have probably gone to jail for a year or two.
Superman comics were going to make children tie bed sheets around our necks and jump off the garage roof. The A-Team was going to make children turn violent. Rock music was going to turn us into Satanists. Sweet alcoholic drinks were going to turn the young into alcoholics. The ice-cream man was really a slipping LSD into their ice-cream to turn them into addicts, but only if the punch given to them at Halloween didn't do it instead, and don't forget about all the pedophiles that were just waiting for children in every chat room.
In other words everything that is even remotely popular is somehow going to absolutely destroy the lives of children everywhere.
Articles like this are good for quiet news weeks. In a year or 2 they will be about something new that is also going to end life as we know it. (The evils of golf or something)
I would also hazard a guess that people who came from homes way too poor for them to have ever been exposed to DOOM, GTA etc, commit most of the violent crime.
I work for a shared website hosting company, our policy is that the entity paying for the site and the mailboxes owns them, in this case the company.
How they choose to use the mail boxes is their business. Trying to override your customers idea of correct policy towards their staff will only cost you their business and the resulting bad reputation will hurt you.
My sympathies if its your relative, you could always lie and say that the box was deleted when the employee left.
Slashdot Mirror
A bit bitter what? He was talking about Apartheid South Africa, old government, not the new one who think anything to do with standards or hard work is some kind of evil neo-colonialist racist plot.
The anti-aircraft gun that went awry was because the the current troops were too lazy/incompetent to set any physical safety stops on the gun so when it suffered a mechanical failure it got to make like it was owned by skynet.
As for the nuke(s) they still managed to build them which is more than most the 3rd world have managed including Iran 20+ years later.
that no one who has thought things through wants to "rent" software? ..., but in my mind, they're real show stoppers.
Um, you have your homepage at dreamhost. Which basically means you are renting a copy of apache and some disk space from them. Do you do use online banking and does the bank charge you a service fee, or do you get less interest in a moneymarket account somewhere else? Yep you are renting again.
Its a value call, what are the risks vs the benefits?
Doesn't seem to be much of a show stopper for you.
This is the same Interpol whose previous president has some pretty serious organized crime connections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Selebi). I think its more about the contracts that can be awarded for maintaining the system than about actually catching anyone important.
Then pump the CO2 through a series of bioreactors to pump up the growth of algae for biodiesel. That way you get the money from the carbon credits and you can resell whatever yield you can get out of the algae.
Profit!!!
Thats why child porn is so great for false accusations. You accuse someone of it and its almost impossible to prove your innocence. If you are feeling brave or you live in a slightly more chilled country search P2P for the R Kelly child porn video. She doesn't look or act even slightly underage but to anyone who hasn't seen it R Kelly is instantly an evil child molester and pornographer.
Itunes used to sell DRM only songs, but it never stopped the IPOD from taking off. Just get a non drm copy of the doc. Now you have the doc and your friend can have his own copy of the doc. Even better than dead-tree. Besides if the kindle becomes even slightly popular there will be a crack for it.
Right now postgresql's take up rate is so low that the economies of scale aren't there to make it worth while.
You wouldn't notice it from reading slashdot but postgresql supporters are like Ruby on Rails or Ron Paul supporters. A few extremely vocal supporters but no real grass roots support.
As long as the primary marketing strategy of postgres is "mysql is bad use us instead" they aren't going to gain any major market share. The benefits of sticking with a widely used standard outweigh the relatively minor benefits of moving.
Speaking as the owner of a mid-size hosting company, I'd say yes definitely. We're whores, we'll sell whatever the customers want.
Right now there's zero demand for postgresql, I've got thousands and thousands of mysql sites but only a handful of postgresql ones. The instant that starts to change I'll start including postgresql in the entry level packages because I know my competitors be will too.
The inquest hasn't even started properly so no one has a clue what really happened.
There have been reports that this was the first live fire exercise for a lot of the soldiers also current South African army has a reputation for being more than a little incompetent. The old South African army were a bunch of psycho racists, but were very good at their jobs, not surprisingly a huge number of senior people were pushed out when the government changed and the organizational knowledge about why safety is a good thing has been destroyed by a group of politicians who think that standards are a racist colonial idea.
I also don't understand why the demand for ebook readers aren't higher. I'm going to get one as soon as they arrive in my country (they are still too new and expensive for me to take the risk importing from the states).
I think that long term epaper readers will really boost the publishing industry. Lower costs means lower prices = more sales= more incentive to publish more books. Also the barrier to publishing a book will plummet which means more books will get published.
As much as I love dead tree books, I'll happily switch to ebooks if they are cheaper and I can lie in bed or on a hammock in the middle of the bush and still read. In my day job I'm forever using reference books which are a pain to use in ebook format if they take up the same screen space that I'm busy working on, and dead tree can REALLY waste desktop space. The size of the actual reader isn't that critical, I even think the bigger the screen the better for the most part. No one complains about the size of the latest chunky bestseller or the size of a reference book.
Don't forget DJB's legendary personality as well.
I've been using PowerDNS to manage several thousand domains for almost 3 years and its been the best thing I ever did. Besides being GPL it has an SQL backend so doing things like changing the TTL for 300 domains takes a few seconds instead of the slog or scripting nightmare with BIND. I use mysql replication to keep my slaves uptodate which is also flawless. Load average handling around 150 queries a second is less than 1%
There is a postgres backend for it as well although I have never tried it.
Social medicine can really backfire as well. I've heard scary stories about patients in the UK waiting months for treatment of non life threatening but otherwise unpleasant medical conditions. Here in South Africa if I needed any serious operation I could probably get it done for free at a state hospital but my chances of dying of septicemia would be high. Last year several babies on life support died when the power failed and the generator didn't start (was out of fuel) and the nurses were too lazy to check on the babies.
My personal feeling is that the best solution would be to heavily subsidize the costs of med school. It would take several years but the supply and demand would drive down prices. Combine that with some attractive financing (i.e assisted but NOT free ) from the state for medical equipment purchases and things would improve.
Free is great for software but its not so great for services.
Its been a while since I've worked heavily with postgres so I can't comment on the speed improvements but on Fedora 6 running postgresql 8.1 only local tcp/ip connections are enabled by default (no -i switch for the postmaster process) and autovacuum is still off by default. The performance in postgres can be really bad with out regular use of vacuum. I know a competent admin can fix all of that easily but your average newbie cannot. I manage a web hosting business with several thousand customers and my experience and every other hosting owner I've ever spoken to is that the demand for postgres is almost zero (less than 1 in 1000 customers).
Please understand that I am a whore and I will sell what ever my customers want but right now almost none of them want postgres. If the postgres devs spent more time improving the friendliness of their system and less time shouting down anyone offering constructive criticism they might start clawing back some market share.
Yep it was really irritating. A lot like the Postgres users who kept claiming the next version of their server was going to be really fast.
In the end the postgres crowd have a right to be upset. They could have been the major player for open databases but their devs were too arrogant to listen to their users and design it to be friendly.
For all its faults mysql is trivial to install and works out of the box for most applications. Last time I looked the default install for postgresql still seemed to be tuned as though it would never have to handle more than a handful of users. Stored procedures and TCP/IP are off by default and the auto vacuum thing needs to be set up manually. Then don't forget that while the postgres query parser does more error checking that mysql its error messages are incredibly cryptic so its MUCH hard to trouble shoot.
Your average newbie takes one looks at it, gives up and moves to mysql. When that newbie finally grows up he has too much time invested in mysql to be bothered learning the intricacies of postgres. Every extra feature that mysql adds is one less reason for anyone to try postgres.
Postgres is a better DB once its setup and tuned properly but considering its usability issues and that mysql users probably out number postgres users a thousand to 1 or more I think mysql is always going to be the number one opensource DB.
I'm with you on that. $2000 would be a bit rich for my blood but I would definitly spend a lot. I'd even buy that sony libre thingy if it ever came to my country. I have boxes of paperbacks at home that I would love to be able to give up on.
When MP3 players first started to come out MP3s were something only geeks had on their computers. Right now most people in any kind of tech job have a few ebooks or help files on their PCs that would be perfect on an ereader.
I think if there was a usable ebook reader it wouldn't take more than 6 months for word of mouth to make readers to start spreading everywhere, and by that time there will be lots of novels for sale all over the web.
you have to explicitly indicate if you want to access global variables from inside a function
I agree and it irritates me daily too, but its still no reason to condemn the language any more than pythons use of whitespace to delimit blocks is a reason to condemn it.
My day job is running an ISP with several thousand PHP/Mysql customers. Personally I've never seen the crashes you mentioned and we have some fairly intensive service monitoring in place. The security vulnerablilities are a problem but I've seen just as many SQL injection attacks under ASP and perl based CGI used to be notorious for its holes. As long as programmers are lazy and trust user input there are going to be problems. Those problems are already mostly solved under PHP if you turn off register_globals, never touch eval and use a DB library like ADODB that allows placeholders in SQL queries.
The thing with PHP and mysql is that it is so scalable. It can handle anything from a one page contact form to a multi server site like wikipedia. In the real world no one actually cares about the best or perfect, they want easy and "good enough". DBs like postgresql lost out because they were so obsessed about being academically perfect they forgot to make things easy for their users.
For simple things, I can live with PHP's warts, but when writing larger or more complex applications, I wish for a Real programming language.
I find all the object enhancements in PHP5 like the autoload function make it pretty good for larger applications. Whats your idea of a Real programming language thats widely supported?
This kind of stuff comes up on slashdot all the time, but I've yet to see any justification for it. PHP might not be that fast or stable under windows but under *nix it's very fast and stable. Mysql might not be the right choice for a fortune 500 financial system but its fast and stable for most web apps. Have you ever bothered to see who actually uses it?
Hmm. Lets see.... Mysql's website claims to have the following companies on board del.icio.us digg flickr wikipedia technorati trulia yahoo and craigslist. Also last time I checked slashdot was also using mysql, and just off the top of my head wikipedia and flickr are both PHP sites.
Except not really because mysql now have SAP DB which is the backend for their maxdb product which is a _LOT_ better than anything SleepyCat ever produced.
My guess is that as soon as SleepyCat becomes a problem they will just merge the maxdb code into the standard mysql database and probably the only reason they haven't yet is that they are making too much money supporting all SAP customers.
PHP catches a lot of flack because it is by far the most popular language out there for building websites which offends the crowd who want work with a language only the ubergeeks can use.
The thing is that a clueless newbie can be productive in less than 2 weeks with PHP (even though looking at his code will make your eyes bleed). While for more experienced programmers its very easy to use things like the object features in PHP5 combined with template tools like smarty and db libraries like ADODB to create stable, maintainable and fast sites. For most small to medium business owners it's a really good choice because the openness helps keep down development costs and if one developer doesn't deliver its easy to find another who can.
When it comes to security the real truth is that it doesn't matter what language you use, if you don't check the user input, you WILL be sorry. Every 3 months or so I'll have a customer upload a formail.pl script from the 1990s and I'll end up having to clean up the mess once the spammers start exploiting it. Most of the security problems with PHP tend to always occur with the same small group of popular packages (phpbb, postnuke, etc.) written by people only worried about the functionality not about the security)
My bet is that within 3 months of oracle flexing their muscles with SleepyCat (remember they haven't done anything yet) Mysql will move MaxDB into the standard mysql distribution and converting will probably just be a dump and reload operation. Why do you think Mysql has suddenly developed stored-procedures, view, and sub queries in such a short period of time?
MaxDB is the SAP database and SAP are investors in Mysql AB.
If I used forum posts as any proxy, it would look like MySQL is dominant.
In the webhosting world that is the understatement of the year. In my business I have a little over 1000 mysql clients and all of 3 postgresql clients. I've been advertising Postgres along side mysql for 2 years now. Its not worth the space or staff training costs.
I think the problem was that postgres was always much more complicated to set up and it used to have some pretty serious performance problems in the real world. It was also much harder for a beginner to learn with, error messages like: syntax error near "'" on a 20 line create statement dont help either.
I think too many people started on mysql and stayed with it as their skill improved, to the point where postgres has become an also-run, no matter what impression slashdot might give you. As for the postgres features, looking through some of my customers databases and code it looks as though a lot of them have never heard of indexes much less normalised data, stored procedures, views etc. SELECT DISTINCTS on 30000 row tables... <shudder>
I would love to hear from other people with some real world usage stats.
The best of all is that its in MP3 format so it works with every mp3 player on the planet. The only glitch I've ever found is that sometimes (but not often) the tags aren't as good as they could be. I usually run my downloads through Easy tag before importing into my IPOD.
A group of us were in the school shooting team (back during apartheid South Africa, all army sponsored).
.22 ammo. We made a set of zip guns, really crude things.
.22 rip the head off with a set of pliers, pour out the powder and fill the shell up with wax. Now you have a round that is only powered by the primer.
We had a really feeble/bored teacher who didn't keep a careful eye on us or on the ammo in the armoury so we used to steal boxes and boxes of
Take the
Really fun to play war games with, except that they would leave HUGE bruises where ever they hit.
Its only now that I am older that I realize how completly stupid we were. Stolen ammo, illegal firearms. If we had been caught I think we would have probably gone to jail for a year or two.
Things I remember from growing up:
Superman comics were going to make children tie bed sheets around our necks and jump off the garage roof. The A-Team was going to make children turn violent. Rock music was going to turn us into Satanists. Sweet alcoholic drinks were going to turn the young into alcoholics. The ice-cream man was really a slipping LSD into their ice-cream to turn them into addicts, but only if the punch given to them at Halloween didn't do it instead, and don't forget about all the pedophiles that were just waiting for children in every chat room.
In other words everything that is even remotely popular is somehow going to absolutely destroy the lives of children everywhere.
Articles like this are good for quiet news weeks. In a year or 2 they will be about something new that is also going to end life as we know it. (The evils of golf or something)
I would also hazard a guess that people who came from homes way too poor for them to have ever been exposed to DOOM, GTA etc, commit most of the violent crime.
I work for a shared website hosting company, our policy is that the entity paying for the site and the mailboxes owns them, in this case the company.
How they choose to use the mail boxes is their business. Trying to override your customers idea of correct policy towards their staff will only cost you their business and the resulting bad reputation will hurt you.
My sympathies if its your relative, you could always lie and say that the box was deleted when the employee left.