Do you really believe that everyone that disagrees with your view of the Constitution must necessarily hold the document in contempt? Perhaps, just perhaps, those people read the same document and came to different conclusions about what it means.
There certainly are reasonable differences of opinion about the Constitution. However, many of the "interpretations" of the Constitution are downright unreasonable and I'd go as far as to say ridiculous.
How is growing marijuana on your own land for your own consumption "commerce among the states"? Under what constitutional authority is Social Security or Medicare legitimate? If you withhold highway funds to coerce some state to follow in lockstep with the wishes of the federal government, how is that equal protection under the law? How is requiring that local libraries provide their patrons' information on demand an exigent circumstance (and therefore exempt from the need for a warrant)?
These things represent a wholesale rejection of the idea of a limited federal government with enumerated powers, and an embrace of an unlimited federal government. If you allow judges (and justices) to follow their "reason" so far away from the actual text, we have completely given up on the rule of law.
"general welfare"
That's in the preamble, and is, at most, context for the framework defined in the Constitution. The general welfare can be promoted by the federal government only by the limited powers granted to them.
Among other things, Hagee has called the Roman Catholic Church "the Great Whore" and says that Catholics are apostates (non-believers).
That's much less incendiary, in my opinion, than telling everyone that the US government injected black people with HIV, or that we're no different from Al-Qaeda. Religions are bound to disagree with other religions, but this guy said some factually incorrect things that are very offensive.
Oh, and Wright said "God damn America," too. A $20k donation and 20 years of attendance to a church supporting that perspective is just too close of an association.
There is clearly a double standard here, and Obama is hiding behind his race.
The tit-for-tat Palestinian/Israeli thing is really getting old.
The attacks will come from whoever can benefit from the attacks. When the Palestinians attack, they often end up gaining some land in the deal, so they keep doing it (the typical land-for-peace agreement). Meanwhile, the US helps Israel defend itself, so the battle is perpetuated. Neither side can overrun the other, due to external influences, so the battle rages on.
Escalating weapons and violence rarely solve anything...
Except during the cold war, where it was in neither Soviet nor US interests to attack the other due to overwhelming offensive power on both sides.
And also, if one side has a big advantage, it usually leads to a quick peace because one side just gets trampled. That's how it is in the case of the US versus the Native Americans. Not much chance of a war there, because one side was completely overrun.
... Getting the answers from someone else for a piece of homework isn't cheating. Finding the questions online and copying the answers verbatim isn't cheating....
You don't decide what's cheating and what's not. The professor does.
Some professors grade based on exams only. Some grade based on exams and homework. For those that grade based on exams and homework, it seems perfectly reasonable to consider the above actions to be cheating. In fact, it would seem unfair to me to reward people with better grades for copying verbatim versus not doing the homework at all.
If your argument is really that exams should be the only tool for grading students in science and math classes, and that homework shouldn't actually count, what makes you qualified to eliminate one of the most common class formats?
If they are charging him with "posting answers on Facebook," or even "soliciting answers on Facebook," that would be more understandably punishable.
Academic integrity is a broad topic. It's not easy to draw solid lines between good and bad behavior. It has a lot more to do with whether you're working against the professor's intent or not. Study groups may be fine in some classes, and not in others. Starting a public study service for hundreds of students without asking the professor is highly subversive.
The answer, in my mind, is to make the students want to learn the material
So it's the professors' fault students are cheating? I don't think so. It's called academic integrity because it requires a certain amount of trust, and when the students violate that trust they should be punished.
Would be cool if there was an algoritm for the past, present and future of the whole universe and everything within;D
Sure, it's called "The Laws of Physics".
The only problem is, nothing can calculate the result faster than our universe is already doing. It's hard to make something that can calculate the behavior of a quark that is smaller than a quark.
Walking and running is a controlled form of falling forwards.
I've always wondered what people mean when they say that. Is standing still a controlled form of falling as well? What if you walk sideways, what's that? It seems to me that lying down must be a controlled fall, because you actually end up at a lower potential energy state, without ever losing control of the states in between.
So is there some kind of scientific basis for your statement? Or is it just one of those things that one person says, and everyone else keeps repeating? Or is it just a statement that is trivially true, such that it could be applied to anything ("swimming is a controlled form of sinking", "baking is a controlled form of burning") and thus has no meaning at all?
Normally unemployment is a separate tax, I believe. But it doesn't matter: my point was that the single biggest government program (larger than the entire DoD during wartime) -- more than 1/5 of all federal spending -- goes toward retirement; not toward helping poor people get back on their feet.
A few things may have changed, maybe medicare is a larger expense now, or maybe some fraction of SS goes to things that aren't retirement. But my point still stands: the lions share of social spending does not help poor people get back on their feet.
Without those "social programs", poor people have exactly zero chance of ever getting back on their feet, and rich people get more money.
The biggest social program is social security (over 20% of federal spending!). How does subsidizing retirement help poor people get back on their feet?
You better make sure you don't retire the week the stock market drops 1000 points.
Why? Can you show a situation where Social Security actually produces a better return for an individual who had a good career?
Re:Errrm, folks, what's the big fat hairy deal?
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 1
[XML is] universal, can be handled by any class and style of data processing
It handles relational algebraic manipulations then? Can you provide a reference?
Now if only someone could come up with a replacement for SQL and enforce universal utf-8 everywhere we could finally leave the 1960s behind us and shed the last pieces of vintage computing we have to deal with on a daily basis. Thats what discussions like these should actually be about.
My understanding is that UTF-8 does not allow representation of all available characters. In particular, there are a few Japanese characters that can't be represented. Additionally, another problem is that the localizations aren't standardized very well, particularly for data management. For instance, en_US has a different sort order on GNU versus Mac. Why these things are not fixed I do not know. Also, the sorting rules for many localizations are expensive, which makes a big difference when it comes to a sort in a database with a lot of tuples.
I'm all for getting rid of SQL, but it needs to be replaced by a better relational language. Anything else will be a regression.
A feature is a feature. Before 8.3 people criticized postgresql for not having full text search because it was an add-on. I think people didn't understand how powerful an add-on can be in postgresql.
Anyway, it's integrated now, so that's one big check mark for postgresql.
Fair enough (although it does make me curious what would happen if there was a UPS failure).
I'm not telling you to rip out the database from a working application. I'm just trying to show you that postgresql is a powerful tool, and that I recommend that you look into it; if not for this application maybe one in the future. I'm a postgresql advocate (not trying to hide that), and this is a postgresql thread, so I don't think that I'm out of place.
If MySQL is working perfectly for you in every way, great. What I'd really like to know is if postgresql could also work for you, and if not, why not (so it can be fixed).
PostgreSQL has changed a lot, but there aren't a lot of great books, primarily because:
* postgresql people are busy, and writing books takes a lot of time
* the audience is smaller
* the docs are very good
* the mailing lists are great
* IRC is very good
Because a newcomer can't even fcuking find out how to declare an unsigned int column, if they are even possible
Unsigned ints aren't available in postgresql unless you create a custom type. Unsigned ints are not standard SQL as far as I know, and usually aren't a good idea. With all of the type coercion demanded by the SQL standard, it's very difficult to support unsigned ints with any kind of intuitive (and correct) coercion to other integer types.
Why do you need them anyway? Just use a check constraint. Declaring a domain is probably the best option.
How many databases support unsigned ints, anyway?
I don't think the docs are that bad. They could spell out that int2 is a two-byte int, I suppose. But how much is there to say about ints?
With Postgres when i have been working with it i am struck immediately by the dearth of information.
Can you give some examples of something that is not fully covered in the docs? The docs are very high quality in my experience, and much better than MySQL docs or books.
If you list some examples of things that you missed, there's a good chance they will get documented.
Maybe Slony is not intrusive per se, but it does require careful planning and execution. It's not a fire-and-forget process.
Don't get me wrong, having that option is great when you need it. But if you don't need it, it's probably better to schedule the time necessary to dump reload.
There's also a caveat: there are cache invalidation problems in 8.2 and before that can cause problems with Slony.
In 8.3 and above the problem is fixed, but that doesn't help when upgrading from a prior release.
Stability isnt critical for my applications. Raw speed is however. A decrease in speed would be rather bad.
I didn't say stability, I said stable performance. If you're afraid of fluctuations in performance (such as bad performance under high load or high concurrency), postgresql may be right for you.
I'm talking about 600 queries per second averaged over the day.
If they are simple queries, that's not very demanding. Have you even tried using anything other that MySQL?
MySQL fits these requirements perfectly.
Fair enough. I am a postgresql advocate, however, so I am still going to suggest that you take postgresql for a spin. If you are under-impressed, you can post to the lists and maybe it will suit your needs better in your next application.
People like myself who design software requiring a database usually prefer speed over features.
Keep in mind that PostgreSQL may have more stable performance for a varied workload. That may mean fewer surprise slowdowns for you.
I don't know your specific situation, but you may want to re-evaluate postgresql for your needs, especially if you care about performance -- PostgreSQL made leaps and bounds in this area in 8.3. I'm not sure what the last version you tried was, but 8.2 was a good performance boost as well.
And if it still doesn't hold up to your expectations, please post your benchmarks to pgsql-performance, so that others can either help you meet the needs, or improve postgresql for the future.
I would think also, as a developer, you might like the data integrity available in PostgreSQL that can help catch tough bugs early. Also, MySQL has many configurable options that may make your application not work and your customers unhappy (including table type -- changing table types from MyISAM to InnoDB or vice-versa may break applications). PostgreSQL's options (for the most part) don't affect the application.
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Wars are cheaper than socialism. Compare the cost of the entire Department of Defense to that of Social Security alone.
Do you really believe that everyone that disagrees with your view of the Constitution must necessarily hold the document in contempt? Perhaps, just perhaps, those people read the same document and came to different conclusions about what it means.
There certainly are reasonable differences of opinion about the Constitution. However, many of the "interpretations" of the Constitution are downright unreasonable and I'd go as far as to say ridiculous.
How is growing marijuana on your own land for your own consumption "commerce among the states"? Under what constitutional authority is Social Security or Medicare legitimate? If you withhold highway funds to coerce some state to follow in lockstep with the wishes of the federal government, how is that equal protection under the law? How is requiring that local libraries provide their patrons' information on demand an exigent circumstance (and therefore exempt from the need for a warrant)?
These things represent a wholesale rejection of the idea of a limited federal government with enumerated powers, and an embrace of an unlimited federal government. If you allow judges (and justices) to follow their "reason" so far away from the actual text, we have completely given up on the rule of law.
"general welfare"
That's in the preamble, and is, at most, context for the framework defined in the Constitution. The general welfare can be promoted by the federal government only by the limited powers granted to them.
Among other things, Hagee has called the Roman Catholic Church "the Great Whore" and says that Catholics are apostates (non-believers).
That's much less incendiary, in my opinion, than telling everyone that the US government injected black people with HIV, or that we're no different from Al-Qaeda. Religions are bound to disagree with other religions, but this guy said some factually incorrect things that are very offensive.
Oh, and Wright said "God damn America," too. A $20k donation and 20 years of attendance to a church supporting that perspective is just too close of an association.
There is clearly a double standard here, and Obama is hiding behind his race.
The tit-for-tat Palestinian/Israeli thing is really getting old.
The attacks will come from whoever can benefit from the attacks. When the Palestinians attack, they often end up gaining some land in the deal, so they keep doing it (the typical land-for-peace agreement). Meanwhile, the US helps Israel defend itself, so the battle is perpetuated. Neither side can overrun the other, due to external influences, so the battle rages on.
Escalating weapons and violence rarely solve anything...
Except during the cold war, where it was in neither Soviet nor US interests to attack the other due to overwhelming offensive power on both sides.
And also, if one side has a big advantage, it usually leads to a quick peace because one side just gets trampled. That's how it is in the case of the US versus the Native Americans. Not much chance of a war there, because one side was completely overrun.
... Getting the answers from someone else for a piece of homework isn't cheating. Finding the questions online and copying the answers verbatim isn't cheating. ...
You don't decide what's cheating and what's not. The professor does.
Some professors grade based on exams only. Some grade based on exams and homework. For those that grade based on exams and homework, it seems perfectly reasonable to consider the above actions to be cheating. In fact, it would seem unfair to me to reward people with better grades for copying verbatim versus not doing the homework at all.
If your argument is really that exams should be the only tool for grading students in science and math classes, and that homework shouldn't actually count, what makes you qualified to eliminate one of the most common class formats?
If they are charging him with "posting answers on Facebook," or even "soliciting answers on Facebook," that would be more understandably punishable.
Academic integrity is a broad topic. It's not easy to draw solid lines between good and bad behavior. It has a lot more to do with whether you're working against the professor's intent or not. Study groups may be fine in some classes, and not in others. Starting a public study service for hundreds of students without asking the professor is highly subversive.
The answer, in my mind, is to make the students want to learn the material
So it's the professors' fault students are cheating? I don't think so. It's called academic integrity because it requires a certain amount of trust, and when the students violate that trust they should be punished.
What other forms of locomotion? All surface locomotion, as far as I can tell, depends on gravity.
Then anything that depends on gravitational force is a controlled fall?
If that's the case, then calling walking a "controlled fall" is meaningless (or nearly so).
Would be cool if there was an algoritm for the past, present and future of the whole universe and everything within ;D
Sure, it's called "The Laws of Physics".
The only problem is, nothing can calculate the result faster than our universe is already doing. It's hard to make something that can calculate the behavior of a quark that is smaller than a quark.
Walking and running is a controlled form of falling forwards.
I've always wondered what people mean when they say that. Is standing still a controlled form of falling as well? What if you walk sideways, what's that? It seems to me that lying down must be a controlled fall, because you actually end up at a lower potential energy state, without ever losing control of the states in between.
So is there some kind of scientific basis for your statement? Or is it just one of those things that one person says, and everyone else keeps repeating? Or is it just a statement that is trivially true, such that it could be applied to anything ("swimming is a controlled form of sinking", "baking is a controlled form of burning") and thus has no meaning at all?
Normally unemployment is a separate tax, I believe. But it doesn't matter: my point was that the single biggest government program (larger than the entire DoD during wartime) -- more than 1/5 of all federal spending -- goes toward retirement; not toward helping poor people get back on their feet.
A few things may have changed, maybe medicare is a larger expense now, or maybe some fraction of SS goes to things that aren't retirement. But my point still stands: the lions share of social spending does not help poor people get back on their feet.
Without those "social programs", poor people have exactly zero chance of ever getting back on their feet, and rich people get more money.
The biggest social program is social security (over 20% of federal spending!). How does subsidizing retirement help poor people get back on their feet?
You better make sure you don't retire the week the stock market drops 1000 points.
Why? Can you show a situation where Social Security actually produces a better return for an individual who had a good career?
[XML is] universal, can be handled by any class and style of data processing
It handles relational algebraic manipulations then? Can you provide a reference?
Now if only someone could come up with a replacement for SQL and enforce universal utf-8 everywhere we could finally leave the 1960s behind us and shed the last pieces of vintage computing we have to deal with on a daily basis. Thats what discussions like these should actually be about.
My understanding is that UTF-8 does not allow representation of all available characters. In particular, there are a few Japanese characters that can't be represented. Additionally, another problem is that the localizations aren't standardized very well, particularly for data management. For instance, en_US has a different sort order on GNU versus Mac. Why these things are not fixed I do not know. Also, the sorting rules for many localizations are expensive, which makes a big difference when it comes to a sort in a database with a lot of tuples.
I'm all for getting rid of SQL, but it needs to be replaced by a better relational language. Anything else will be a regression.
A feature is a feature. Before 8.3 people criticized postgresql for not having full text search because it was an add-on. I think people didn't understand how powerful an add-on can be in postgresql.
Anyway, it's integrated now, so that's one big check mark for postgresql.
Fair enough (although it does make me curious what would happen if there was a UPS failure).
I'm not telling you to rip out the database from a working application. I'm just trying to show you that postgresql is a powerful tool, and that I recommend that you look into it; if not for this application maybe one in the future. I'm a postgresql advocate (not trying to hide that), and this is a postgresql thread, so I don't think that I'm out of place.
If MySQL is working perfectly for you in every way, great. What I'd really like to know is if postgresql could also work for you, and if not, why not (so it can be fixed).
PostgreSQL has changed a lot, but there aren't a lot of great books, primarily because:
* postgresql people are busy, and writing books takes a lot of time
* the audience is smaller
* the docs are very good
* the mailing lists are great
* IRC is very good
Because a newcomer can't even fcuking find out how to declare an unsigned int column, if they are even possible
Unsigned ints aren't available in postgresql unless you create a custom type. Unsigned ints are not standard SQL as far as I know, and usually aren't a good idea. With all of the type coercion demanded by the SQL standard, it's very difficult to support unsigned ints with any kind of intuitive (and correct) coercion to other integer types.
Why do you need them anyway? Just use a check constraint. Declaring a domain is probably the best option.
How many databases support unsigned ints, anyway?
I don't think the docs are that bad. They could spell out that int2 is a two-byte int, I suppose. But how much is there to say about ints?
With Postgres when i have been working with it i am struck immediately by the dearth of information.
Can you give some examples of something that is not fully covered in the docs? The docs are very high quality in my experience, and much better than MySQL docs or books.
If you list some examples of things that you missed, there's a good chance they will get documented.
MySQL is very stable.
This article by Monty implies that MyISAM is not crash safe:
http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/01/maria-engine-is-released.html
He developed the Maria engine to make "a crash-safe alternative to MyISAM". And this is from one of the most prominent MySQL developers.
Are there DBMSs that can optimize joins across physically separate machines?
Maybe Slony is not intrusive per se, but it does require careful planning and execution. It's not a fire-and-forget process.
Don't get me wrong, having that option is great when you need it. But if you don't need it, it's probably better to schedule the time necessary to dump reload.
There's also a caveat: there are cache invalidation problems in 8.2 and before that can cause problems with Slony.
In 8.3 and above the problem is fixed, but that doesn't help when upgrading from a prior release.
Stability isnt critical for my applications. Raw speed is however. A decrease in speed would be rather bad.
I didn't say stability, I said stable performance. If you're afraid of fluctuations in performance (such as bad performance under high load or high concurrency), postgresql may be right for you.
I'm talking about 600 queries per second averaged over the day.
If they are simple queries, that's not very demanding. Have you even tried using anything other that MySQL?
MySQL fits these requirements perfectly.
Fair enough. I am a postgresql advocate, however, so I am still going to suggest that you take postgresql for a spin. If you are under-impressed, you can post to the lists and maybe it will suit your needs better in your next application.
People like myself who design software requiring a database usually prefer speed over features.
Keep in mind that PostgreSQL may have more stable performance for a varied workload. That may mean fewer surprise slowdowns for you.
I don't know your specific situation, but you may want to re-evaluate postgresql for your needs, especially if you care about performance -- PostgreSQL made leaps and bounds in this area in 8.3. I'm not sure what the last version you tried was, but 8.2 was a good performance boost as well.
And if it still doesn't hold up to your expectations, please post your benchmarks to pgsql-performance, so that others can either help you meet the needs, or improve postgresql for the future.
I would think also, as a developer, you might like the data integrity available in PostgreSQL that can help catch tough bugs early. Also, MySQL has many configurable options that may make your application not work and your customers unhappy (including table type -- changing table types from MyISAM to InnoDB or vice-versa may break applications). PostgreSQL's options (for the most part) don't affect the application.
As such, the question then becomes: when am I going to be certain that the data is written to disk?
When a well-defined delay expires, see wal_writer_delay. The maximum window of vulnerability is 3 times the WAL writer delay.
See more here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/wal-async-commit.html