Last I checked (2004), Social Security alone was more than the entire DoD budget. Some very prominent people, like the comptroller general seem to think that federal medical care programs will soon eclipse social security.
The VP has very few official duties; one of which is being next in line for the presidency, another is being president of the Senate.
From wikipedia: "The informal roles and functions of the Vice President depend on the specific relationship between the President and the Vice President."
So, if most of what she's going to be doing is unofficial work delegated by the president, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask what McCain will expect of her.
If you feel that the mother is an individual, and therefore can do what she wants with her own body, you might come to a pro-choice conclusion.
If you feel that the (potential) child is an individual, you might come to a pro-life conclusion.
To add to the complexity, a libertarian is likely to be a defender of the Constitution, and might come to the conclusion that the Constitution does not grant the federal government any authority on the issue, and therefore it should be left up to the states (10th Amendment).
Personally, I would argue that it should be a state issue (I think Roe v Wade was a wrong decision). It's doubtful I'd be persuaded on this particular point.
If voting on it in my state, I would vote to allow abortions within some kind of reasonable boundaries (probably a time limit unless there was a risk to the mother's life). I could probably be persuaded on this point in either direction.
I agree that wiretapping of citizens without a warrant is clearly a violation of the 4th.
However, almost all of the justices have shown a profound disregard for the Constitution, with the notable exception of justice Thomas.
If you look at a ruling like Gonzales v. Raich, you'll see that conservative appointees are much more likely to defend the Constitution than liberal appointees. This was clearly a "liberal" cause -- control over one's own body -- yet the only ones to dissent to the (incorrect) ruling were conservatives.
If you have a counterexample, I'd like to see it. Particularly any time that Thomas is on the wrong side of a clear Constitutional issue.
But they usually don't disown the philosophies, because they usually don't have members that operate exactly opposite their philosophy.
That's a good point. There are a disproportionate number of people who claim to be conservative and then turn out to be big spenders, etc.
You go find an American Communist, and talk to them, and they will tell you that the absolutely failure of all communist regimes isn't due to communism, it's due to the fact that none of them were 'really' communism.
Absolutely true. I have had such a conversation in the past.
Getting to Social Security, you tell me ONE THING wrong with making sure people have something when they retire.
So let's say, for the sake of argument, that forced saving is a good thing for everyone.
Social security is not saving anything, it's a forced money redistribution scheme. The "investment" is in US Treasury bonds, which means that the government spent it.
If you loan the US government money, and the US government spends it, it's still reasonable to say that you have saved it. But if you loan yourself money, and then spend it, then you have certainly not saved it. And that's exactly what Social Security is all about.
If people had individual accounts (again, we're still assuming forced contributions), and those individual accounts could only be invested in US Treasury bonds, then at least it would be clear how much of a problem the system has. But we have no idea, because there's no accounting for the money.
Oh, and "fingernail slice"?? It's about 15% of your income. If you believe the ~7% number, you need to read an economics book.
My memory of McCain in 2000 was that he was considered to be not a conservative. Who called him a conservative in 2000?
I don't disagree that there is some inconsistency and rewriting of history. However, I'm not sure this is the most important example in modern politics, and I'm not entirely sure that this is specific to any one group.
I called it messy and strange because I found it to be messy and strange.
Short selling can help balance out markets because when the market starts to go down, the short sellers are buying stocks and therefore mitigating the downturn.
Other "strange" things can also help balance out markets, like buying futures. People keep talking about "evil oil speculators", but the fact is, they drive up the price now which causes us to conserve oil, so that the price doesn't spike so much in the future.
Now if we could just get a hiearchical data model and associated standards based query language at the same time
I really hope you're joking. Hierarchical databases were the reason people needed to invent RDBMSs. They haven't made it outside of the filesystem world for a reason.
Graph theory just doesn't provide many useful operations for data management. It tends to be highly asymmetrical, for one thing. Consider an iPhone as a product in a database: do you store it as "/Apple/Hardware/iPhone" or "/Hardware/Apple/iPhone"? Where do you look for it? Is there also a separate "phones" node somewhere in the graph (or hierarchy)? Where does the "software" node go?
Query caches on my machines ( with an approximate read:write ratio of 20:1 ) get hit about 88% of the time.
This means approximately 100% of your read queries are exactly the same query.
There are all kinds of ways to solve that kind of problem by not issuing the same query to the database constantly. You can use memcached, or you can auto-generate the ultimate static content that you're going to present to the user.
It's fine if you want to use a query cache, but the situations in which it is actually useful are very narrow, and even in those situations, there are good alternatives.
Block level caches (by the DBMS or the OS) are more generally useful, because they are never out of date, and can be useful for a wider range of queries. Of course you still have to go through the parser, etc, to make use of the block level cache, and there are situations where it's not as efficient as caching the result set (like when aggregating huge amounts of data that can't all be held in memory at once).
With a full RDBMS, you just need to lock a single table or (ideally) a few rows in that table. This blocks people doing SELECT * type things, but a lot of other reads can go ahead.
With some RDBMSs, like PostgreSQL, writers do not block readers at all.
You can use some of the integrity-checking in the DB for extra security, but you cannot rely on it to implement your core functionality.
How do you implement UNIQUE in the application? That is often core functionality.
These ideas about "simple" persistence layers usually result in huge amounts of application code. A persistence layer is essentially the same as a virtual memory system: it can read or write to data stored with some key. Management of complex data is not well suited to this abstraction, and so the huge amounts of application code are to work around the poor abstraction.
For extremely simple applications, this persistence layer may suffice. However, the complexity threshold at which an RDBMS becomes a better abstraction is very low.
Sometimes they can be useful for access control, but I think of stored procedures as a different way to use the DBMS.
Usually, you generate SQL code and send it to the DBMS which evaluates your expression. Using a stored procedure is conceptually more like an RPC (even if it still requires to to generate some trivial SQL to execute it).
I think I disagree on 'rollback prepared'; PREPARE signals intent to COMMIT, and a successful PREPARE is a promise that nothing will impede a later COMMIT.
If you have a table "employee" with a FK "department_name" referencing department, and you have two transactions: 1) INSERT INTO department VALUES ('accounting',...); 2) INSERT INTO employee VALUES('joe',..., 'accounting');
Your proposal is to allow #2 to commit so long as #1 has prepared. But what do people see in the window in between when #2 commits and when #1 commits? They would see an employee without a department.
Are you free to elaborate on your overlap constraint implementation?
"Currently the only constraints that can be verified across transaction boundaries... are primary, unique, and foreign key constraints, and that's mostly thanks to voodoo in the indexing components of the database system."
It's not that they can see other data, it's that other transactions take out locks. Transactions aren't isolated from the locks of other transactions, obviously. UNIQUE is the only constraint in PostgreSQL that uses "index voodoo", that is, the locks required for a UNIQUE constraint don't last for the entire transaction.
"so long as the other one commits [prepare is sufficient] "
Prepare isn't sufficient for the feature you describe. The point of prepare is that you can still do "rollback prepared", but if other transactions already think you committed, it's wrong to rollback.
What you're talking about is not really feasible in the near future. The locking would need to be extremely intelligent: it would need to understand your constraint, and understand what kinds of things will cause a violation if the commits happen in some certain order, and then decide which transactions to block, which to allow through unimpeded, and which need to be aborted.
Currently, there's somewhat of a mix of strategies in use. It's easy to tell exactly what will cause a violation of the unique constraint, so it's easy to answer this for the specific case of UNIQUE: block if there's a conflicting transaction in progress, let it through if there is no conflict at all, and abort if there's a committed conflicting tuple.
Also, instead of trying to determine which tuples will violate your constraint, we often just determine when it might. This leads to the over-aggressive locking (which you're trying to avoid), but it works.
I am working on (still in design stages) a "non-overlapping" constraint for PostgreSQL for my temporal user-defined type "period". The non-overlapping constraint is important for the concept of temporal keys, but can't be implemented with UNIQUE alone. I can solve it in much the same way as UNIQUE is solved: by treating it as a special-case constraint where I know in advance what the conflicts are. I think I can make it into an infrastructure that will allow people to define any constraint with that property (can determine conflicts ahead of time).
Yes: you know how to work around a problem like this (probably 5 different ways), but you don't want to jump through hoops to solve something that should not be a problem in the first place.
It's not like you're asking for a date type based on the Mars days and years. These are Earth timestamps that you're talking about here.
nifty features like on-commit triggers that let you enforce constraints no other database will help you enforce
Can you be more specific? PostgreSQL offers something called "constraint triggers", which can be deferred until commit time (using the same semantics as deferred FK checks).
Again, the request was for a simple solution to a simple problem.
Good support for data types in a database is crucial to ease of use.
The 3 most important data types (in my opinion) are text, integers, and points in time. There are other useful data types, but it's particularly painful to be without at least those 3. MySQL should get this right and have a higher-precision timestamp.
So you're saying that it's OK with you if someone else has control over your device (a control that you don't have at all, by the way), so long as there is some way (however impractical) to sufficiently disable your own device so that they can't exercise that control?
Unless I'm mistaken, it's more free than any other phone out there. We can't compare this to an ideal, we have to compare it to alternatives, and decide where to vote with our dollars.
Even my Debian desktop is not entirely free. I use a proprietary nvidia driver, and I use the flash player.
Someone invested a lot of money -- and might see much of it lost -- trying to make this phone. The revenue they generate indicates the demand, and will be the primary deciding factor for future investment.
There are pretty serious privacy concerns with cell phones -- arguably more serious than with desktop computers.
Right now it would be convenient for the police to mandate various kinds of back doors so that they can spy on you. I don't know whether this is true or not, but they may already be able to turn on your phone remotely, so that they can track you. They need the cooperation of the phone companies, but they already have companies like ATT under their thumbs ("do what we say, or we'll investigate you for anti-trust violations").
So, even though this phone doesn't really compete on technical merits, and isn't as free as we would like, it's still worth considering.
I have long felt that the 9th Amendment argument is the strongest argument for preventing laws banning abortions.
However, they didn't argue on those grounds, the Roe v. Wade decision was based on privacy, which is just stupid.
The problem with a 9th Amendment argument is that they are not actually written into the Constitution, and therefore aren't really based on the Rule of Law at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Wars are cheaper than socialism.
Last I checked (2004), Social Security alone was more than the entire DoD budget. Some very prominent people, like the comptroller general seem to think that federal medical care programs will soon eclipse social security.
The VP has very few official duties; one of which is being next in line for the presidency, another is being president of the Senate.
From wikipedia: "The informal roles and functions of the Vice President depend on the specific relationship between the President and the Vice President."
So, if most of what she's going to be doing is unofficial work delegated by the president, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask what McCain will expect of her.
It's simply a matter of perspective.
If you feel that the mother is an individual, and therefore can do what she wants with her own body, you might come to a pro-choice conclusion.
If you feel that the (potential) child is an individual, you might come to a pro-life conclusion.
To add to the complexity, a libertarian is likely to be a defender of the Constitution, and might come to the conclusion that the Constitution does not grant the federal government any authority on the issue, and therefore it should be left up to the states (10th Amendment).
Personally, I would argue that it should be a state issue (I think Roe v Wade was a wrong decision). It's doubtful I'd be persuaded on this particular point.
If voting on it in my state, I would vote to allow abortions within some kind of reasonable boundaries (probably a time limit unless there was a risk to the mother's life). I could probably be persuaded on this point in either direction.
I agree that wiretapping of citizens without a warrant is clearly a violation of the 4th.
However, almost all of the justices have shown a profound disregard for the Constitution, with the notable exception of justice Thomas.
If you look at a ruling like Gonzales v. Raich, you'll see that conservative appointees are much more likely to defend the Constitution than liberal appointees. This was clearly a "liberal" cause -- control over one's own body -- yet the only ones to dissent to the (incorrect) ruling were conservatives.
If you have a counterexample, I'd like to see it. Particularly any time that Thomas is on the wrong side of a clear Constitutional issue.
I think this is more to the point. People have an idea that certain information is sensitive, like SSNs, credit card numbers, and a few other things.
But most people think "Gas bill? Sure, why not? I don't care if you know that I spend $4.54 more per month than my neighbor."
Another important difference is that there's no greed involved here. It's just a natural desire to help people get their job done without hassle.
But they usually don't disown the philosophies, because they usually don't have members that operate exactly opposite their philosophy.
That's a good point. There are a disproportionate number of people who claim to be conservative and then turn out to be big spenders, etc.
You go find an American Communist, and talk to them, and they will tell you that the absolutely failure of all communist regimes isn't due to communism, it's due to the fact that none of them were 'really' communism.
Absolutely true. I have had such a conversation in the past.
Getting to Social Security, you tell me ONE THING wrong with making sure people have something when they retire.
So let's say, for the sake of argument, that forced saving is a good thing for everyone.
Social security is not saving anything, it's a forced money redistribution scheme. The "investment" is in US Treasury bonds, which means that the government spent it.
If you loan the US government money, and the US government spends it, it's still reasonable to say that you have saved it. But if you loan yourself money, and then spend it, then you have certainly not saved it. And that's exactly what Social Security is all about.
If people had individual accounts (again, we're still assuming forced contributions), and those individual accounts could only be invested in US Treasury bonds, then at least it would be clear how much of a problem the system has. But we have no idea, because there's no accounting for the money.
Oh, and "fingernail slice"?? It's about 15% of your income. If you believe the ~7% number, you need to read an economics book.
Interesting observation.
My memory of McCain in 2000 was that he was considered to be not a conservative. Who called him a conservative in 2000?
I don't disagree that there is some inconsistency and rewriting of history. However, I'm not sure this is the most important example in modern politics, and I'm not entirely sure that this is specific to any one group.
The Republicans are always 'conservative' until they inevitably fail, at which point they've never been conservative.
How do you explain McCain then? He was (and still is) harshly criticized by the right for not being a conservative.
In fact, pretty much all of the Republican nominees were criticized in that fashion.
I called it messy and strange because I found it to be messy and strange.
Short selling can help balance out markets because when the market starts to go down, the short sellers are buying stocks and therefore mitigating the downturn.
Other "strange" things can also help balance out markets, like buying futures. People keep talking about "evil oil speculators", but the fact is, they drive up the price now which causes us to conserve oil, so that the price doesn't spike so much in the future.
Now if we could just get a hiearchical data model and associated standards based query language at the same time
I really hope you're joking. Hierarchical databases were the reason people needed to invent RDBMSs. They haven't made it outside of the filesystem world for a reason.
Graph theory just doesn't provide many useful operations for data management. It tends to be highly asymmetrical, for one thing. Consider an iPhone as a product in a database: do you store it as "/Apple/Hardware/iPhone" or "/Hardware/Apple/iPhone"? Where do you look for it? Is there also a separate "phones" node somewhere in the graph (or hierarchy)? Where does the "software" node go?
Query caches on my machines ( with an approximate read:write ratio of 20:1 ) get hit about 88% of the time.
This means approximately 100% of your read queries are exactly the same query.
There are all kinds of ways to solve that kind of problem by not issuing the same query to the database constantly. You can use memcached, or you can auto-generate the ultimate static content that you're going to present to the user.
It's fine if you want to use a query cache, but the situations in which it is actually useful are very narrow, and even in those situations, there are good alternatives.
Block level caches (by the DBMS or the OS) are more generally useful, because they are never out of date, and can be useful for a wider range of queries. Of course you still have to go through the parser, etc, to make use of the block level cache, and there are situations where it's not as efficient as caching the result set (like when aggregating huge amounts of data that can't all be held in memory at once).
With a full RDBMS, you just need to lock a single table or (ideally) a few rows in that table. This blocks people doing SELECT * type things, but a lot of other reads can go ahead.
With some RDBMSs, like PostgreSQL, writers do not block readers at all.
You can use some of the integrity-checking in the DB for extra security, but you cannot rely on it to implement your core functionality.
How do you implement UNIQUE in the application? That is often core functionality.
These ideas about "simple" persistence layers usually result in huge amounts of application code. A persistence layer is essentially the same as a virtual memory system: it can read or write to data stored with some key. Management of complex data is not well suited to this abstraction, and so the huge amounts of application code are to work around the poor abstraction.
For extremely simple applications, this persistence layer may suffice. However, the complexity threshold at which an RDBMS becomes a better abstraction is very low.
That can also be easily accomplished with views.
Sometimes they can be useful for access control, but I think of stored procedures as a different way to use the DBMS.
Usually, you generate SQL code and send it to the DBMS which evaluates your expression. Using a stored procedure is conceptually more like an RPC (even if it still requires to to generate some trivial SQL to execute it).
I think I disagree on 'rollback prepared'; PREPARE signals intent to COMMIT, and a successful PREPARE is a promise that nothing will impede a later COMMIT.
If you have a table "employee" with a FK "department_name" referencing department, and you have two transactions: ...); ..., 'accounting');
1) INSERT INTO department VALUES ('accounting',
2) INSERT INTO employee VALUES('joe',
Your proposal is to allow #2 to commit so long as #1 has prepared. But what do people see in the window in between when #2 commits and when #1 commits? They would see an employee without a department.
Are you free to elaborate on your overlap constraint implementation?
Here's my original proposal:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-06/msg00404.php
Even finding overlaps isn't a terribly efficient operation, unless you're also using a form of spatial indexing on your custom datatype
I am.
My reply is somewhat brief because I am on my way out the door.
"Currently the only constraints that can be verified across transaction boundaries ... are primary, unique, and foreign key constraints, and that's mostly thanks to voodoo in the indexing components of the database system."
It's not that they can see other data, it's that other transactions take out locks. Transactions aren't isolated from the locks of other transactions, obviously. UNIQUE is the only constraint in PostgreSQL that uses "index voodoo", that is, the locks required for a UNIQUE constraint don't last for the entire transaction.
"so long as the other one commits [prepare is sufficient] "
Prepare isn't sufficient for the feature you describe. The point of prepare is that you can still do "rollback prepared", but if other transactions already think you committed, it's wrong to rollback.
What you're talking about is not really feasible in the near future. The locking would need to be extremely intelligent: it would need to understand your constraint, and understand what kinds of things will cause a violation if the commits happen in some certain order, and then decide which transactions to block, which to allow through unimpeded, and which need to be aborted.
Currently, there's somewhat of a mix of strategies in use. It's easy to tell exactly what will cause a violation of the unique constraint, so it's easy to answer this for the specific case of UNIQUE: block if there's a conflicting transaction in progress, let it through if there is no conflict at all, and abort if there's a committed conflicting tuple.
Also, instead of trying to determine which tuples will violate your constraint, we often just determine when it might. This leads to the over-aggressive locking (which you're trying to avoid), but it works.
I am working on (still in design stages) a "non-overlapping" constraint for PostgreSQL for my temporal user-defined type "period". The non-overlapping constraint is important for the concept of temporal keys, but can't be implemented with UNIQUE alone. I can solve it in much the same way as UNIQUE is solved: by treating it as a special-case constraint where I know in advance what the conflicts are. I think I can make it into an infrastructure that will allow people to define any constraint with that property (can determine conflicts ahead of time).
"every master row must have between 5 and 7 child rows"
You realize that you can't allow concurrent inserts if you have a check like that, right?
"unless maybe a constraint-trigger is also allowed to modify data"
Yeah, they can. They can't modify the rows before they are inserted, or anything like that, but you can, e.g., execute a separate INSERT statement.
I think that both databases offer a lot of tools to developers. I don't know much about FirebirdSQL, but it seems like a pretty good RDBMS to me.
"I hope I've made a fairly rational argument."
Yes: you know how to work around a problem like this (probably 5 different ways), but you don't want to jump through hoops to solve something that should not be a problem in the first place.
It's not like you're asking for a date type based on the Mars days and years. These are Earth timestamps that you're talking about here.
nifty features like on-commit triggers that let you enforce constraints no other database will help you enforce
Can you be more specific? PostgreSQL offers something called "constraint triggers", which can be deferred until commit time (using the same semantics as deferred FK checks).
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/sql-createconstraint.html
Again, the request was for a simple solution to a simple problem.
Good support for data types in a database is crucial to ease of use.
The 3 most important data types (in my opinion) are text, integers, and points in time. There are other useful data types, but it's particularly painful to be without at least those 3. MySQL should get this right and have a higher-precision timestamp.
What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
Anti-trust lawsuit, of course. Those can be filed so arbitrarily -- and are so costly -- they make a perfect weapon.
So you're saying that it's OK with you if someone else has control over your device (a control that you don't have at all, by the way), so long as there is some way (however impractical) to sufficiently disable your own device so that they can't exercise that control?
Unless I'm mistaken, it's more free than any other phone out there. We can't compare this to an ideal, we have to compare it to alternatives, and decide where to vote with our dollars.
Even my Debian desktop is not entirely free. I use a proprietary nvidia driver, and I use the flash player.
Someone invested a lot of money -- and might see much of it lost -- trying to make this phone. The revenue they generate indicates the demand, and will be the primary deciding factor for future investment.
There are pretty serious privacy concerns with cell phones -- arguably more serious than with desktop computers.
Right now it would be convenient for the police to mandate various kinds of back doors so that they can spy on you. I don't know whether this is true or not, but they may already be able to turn on your phone remotely, so that they can track you. They need the cooperation of the phone companies, but they already have companies like ATT under their thumbs ("do what we say, or we'll investigate you for anti-trust violations").
So, even though this phone doesn't really compete on technical merits, and isn't as free as we would like, it's still worth considering.
I have long felt that the 9th Amendment argument is the strongest argument for preventing laws banning abortions.
However, they didn't argue on those grounds, the Roe v. Wade decision was based on privacy, which is just stupid.
The problem with a 9th Amendment argument is that they are not actually written into the Constitution, and therefore aren't really based on the Rule of Law at all.