couldn't something be done about the OS so it could make some applications written for a single core take advantage of multiple cores?
That would seem to be VERY difficult to do without introducing many strange bugs. Software is made up of text, data, stack, and heap segments, all in a virtual address space. For a single-threaded application, there is one instruction pointer that points to the next instruction to be executed. So, the whole thing is very linear.
However, there are potentially things that a compiler could do. It has a lot more information about what variables depend on what other variables. Still hard, but seems more managable at the compiler level.
[conservatives] are quick to choose safety in the "safety vs. liberty" debate
First off, you're confusing conservatism as a philosophy with how people who call themselves "conservative" actually behave in office.
For the most part, politicians take freedoms away. There are many reasons (money primarily), but that's what happens, Democrat or Republican. But to do that, they have to give you a little freedom in one place, and take a lot of freedom somewhere else.
In a very general sense, democrats take away economic freedoms an give you back some personal freedoms. Republicans take away personal freedoms but give you economic freedoms.
To give a counterexample to your statement, how about "Safety net" type programs? One might say a liberal would give up economic freedom in exchange for economic safety.
From the wording you gave, it doesn't look as though you see economic liberty as an important liberty, but in my opinion it is every bit as important as free speech and more important than privacy.
For some, it's because they were never good employees. For others, they were once needed and now they do not produce a net positive.
On this planet, being hard working or loyal or nice is not -- by itself -- a guarantee that others owe you something. You need to be hard at work doing something useful. Otherwise you are a liability.
The main difference is, for every jew or christian that murders someone, there are 100 jews and christians who loudly denounce the act, and demand speedy justice.
Where are the muslims who demand a stop to all this? I want to hear the religious leaders saying that they don't support the violence over the cartoons, and that everyone who engages in it needs to be punished immediately.
It was found that by making the black and white schools separate, the separation made them inherently unequal.
That seems to be the analogy. I just don't agree. You aren't physically separating anyone, first of all. And there's nothing that says gay people can't get married in a hetersexual relationship. I would assume that many are. So it appears that treatment under the law is equal. If you were black you could not attend a white school under segregation.
The status of "eligible voter" was originally limited to "white male property owner over 21 years old".
I don't think that really works. "Eligible voter" means anyone able to vote. When you change who is eligible, I don't think that changes the meaning at all. It's not changing of language by government. "Marriage" would require such a redefinition to include same-sex couples.
claimed that homosexual lifestyle is a "choice"
Clearly there's a choice involved, and obviously that choice is affected by preference. Preference is a state that can only be affected by biological factors and/or environmental factors. I don't know which one affects the preference more, but it doesn't really matter either. I guess people try to claim its environmental so that they can assign "blame" or something, or somehow feel in control.
Upon a reread of my post, I found the following statement was unnecessary and insufficiently supported:
"If you need outside reassurance of your union, maybe it's best to just not get together?"
Which justifies your apt response.
What I originally meant was, I think most people who demand gay marriage are probably more interested in the outside endorsement of gay partnerships than the fine details of what gay marriage actually means. I still think that's true, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for allowances to be made. However, "marriage" has a meaning, and I don't think it's valid to redefine it for purely political reasons.
The post I was replying to was claiming that the entire issue was made up by the anti-gay crowd, which it isn't. The issue comes from both sides. I say just get the government out of the whole marriage thing, and it would go away.
Gay people can already do what they want. Gays are asking for the government to get involved through marriage.
Should the government get involved in heterosexual marriages? Maybe, maybe not. But the point is that gays are specifically asking the government to get involved in their partnerships.
If you need outside reassurance of your union, maybe it's best to just not get together?
Civil liberties means gay people can do pretty much whatever they want. It does not mean that they are entitled to government endorsement.
There are lots of companies offering support for PostgreSQL. If you need it to be a "big, enterprise-class" company, how about (as one example) Sun Microsystems, which offers 24/7 postgresql support?
Oh, and I forgot to mention, many consumer-grade ide disks will actually lie about write caching (or so I've heard). The easiest way to tell for sure is if your transaction commit rate is higher than the disk rotation rate.
will the DB software be able to guarentee that the date is in a consistant state afterwards
PostgreSQL guarantees that so long as the error doesn't have something to do with the hard disk. Many people leave "write caching" enabled on the disk, meaning that no database or filesystem can guarantee consistency after a power failure. Also, of course bad sectors or something could destroy data. This is the same guarantee you get from Oracle.
But take PostgreSQL, run at whatever load you want, pull the plug, and it WILL be consistent (so long as write caching is off).
many legal ramifications
And many legals disclaimers, disclaiming any liability on behalf of Oracle or IBM.
Linux's VM is (anecdotal evidence, of course) really solid.
Can someone please explain where the OOM Killer fits in? Once I was running a PostgreSQL database on the same machine as a process with a memory leak. Linux decided to kill PostgreSQL. What gives?
It sure doesn't seem that way to me. It seems to me like the pace of technological innovation is increasing and reaching consumers faster. You can probably find a few examples of mismanaged companies, but many companies still have huge research budgets and bring that new technology to consumers very quickly.
Think about how quickly multi-core processors are making it into the market. Is that because of short-term thinking? What about a company like IBM putting billions into Linux development, is that short-term thinking? What about the billions invested by drug companies to create better medications, that allow AIDS and cancer patients to live much longer than before?
Sometimes you need these things for reasonable efficiency. Especially functional indexes! And user-defined types are an important part of the relational model.
because people like IBM and Oracle guarantee that when the power goes out, the transaction completed, or it didn't happen at all.
What kind of guarantees do they actually provide? For all of Oracle, IBM, and PostgreSQL the likelihood of a hardware error is far greater than the likelihood of a software error that leaves the database inconsistent.
So what, will Oracle pay you money if a software failure occurs? What about a hardware failure?
From a technical standpoint, PostgreSQL is probably more trustworthy when it comes to data integrity. Oracle is often installed on better hardware, but that's not the fault of PostgreSQL.
Once I did a hybrid python/C project because C by itself was impossible for me to maintain in the given time constraints.
It worked amazingly well. There's a little bit of interfacing work that needs to be done, but I found that, in that project at least, the C code didn't need to be modified very often.
It very often DOES simplify to use two programming languages.
That's certainly a possibility. But marriage law is based on common human behaviors, and differences between men and women, that have been established over a long time. If you operate outside of that, it's probably best to define your relationship exactly as you want in a written contract.
There are things about marriage law that clearly don't apply to gay couples, for instance, it's legally assumed that you're the father if your wife has a child (unless proven otherwise).
I don't think we should arbitrarily do a global search-and-replace on marriage law and hope for the best. What about 3 people that want to get married? What about people and animals? There are bound to be some nasty disputes.
I'd much rather the government just get out entirely. It would need to happen slowly, but it could be done.
And by the way, why would any sane person want the government to get involved where they aren't already? Gay people have a clean slate, no government to screw it up. Nobody bothering them. They decide what they want, and make their own choices. It's like if you had a little uptopia hidden away, and then all of a sudden you get an urge for federal highway funds.
I said culture forces them. Not the government. The reason a lot of couples get married is a feeling of obligation and peer pressure, which is a cultural thing.
You made a good point, but the analogy doesn't necessarily work.
Morality is personal*, and government-mandated segregation is considered morally wrong. So is race discrimination in public businesses, like a theater. You can't arbitrarily attach the same concept of a moral wrong to denying homosexual marriage. Indeed, that's what the whole debate is about.
The debate is more important because government is involved in marriage. The real debate should focus on these questions:
(1) Why is government involved in marriage?
Because many women would be at a severe financial disadvantage during and after a marriage with no government involvement (if all else were equal). Many women want to provide their part of marriage by raising children, and making life easier for other members of the family. Many men prefer to provide their part of marriage by providing income to the family through a career. If that is the case, after the kids leave home, the man could just leave the woman. At that point the man is probably at his highest earning power, and the woman probably would have no career or experience at all, no savings, little physical attractiveness, and not much earning ability because she's not at her physical labor peak.
I am not suggesting that this is how it should be, or how it always is. I am claiming that marriage law intervenes to provide alternative incentives and alternative outcomes. In theory, if the government did not involve itself, the marriage could be settled with a private marriage contract. However, the man would probably just not sign it, just like a woman might refuse a prenuptial agreement today. The culture demands that, if a child is on the way, a marriage happens, contract or not. The power rests with the person who benefits most from the default case, which is no contract at all. When two people are culturally forced together, the contract can become a zero-sum game (unlike normal contracts, which are mutually beneficial), because often the only thing to negotiate is who gets the money generated before the marriage, during the marriage, and after the marriage.
(2) Do those same reasons from #1 apply to homosexual marriage?
No.
(3) Do those same reasons from #1 justify government involvement?
Maybe. If the government backed out, society would need to step up and change the culture to demand that certain agreements are made along with the marriage. Perhaps it would be good, because people would understand what they're signing up for, and it would test their true compatibility and commitment. It could be bad if the negotiations got heated while a child is on the way.
And all of this is intertwined with child support laws. That's another long debate.
* By this I mean that either it's relative if you're a moral relativist, or if you're a moral absolutist than you still need to decide on your interpretation of morality, which could be different for everyone. I'm not declaring morailty to necessarily be relative or absolute, just personal.
You still pay the same amount on disk I/O (actually more), you just spread it out.
Not true at all. Let's count some I/O in an example. Let's say you have a 5 GB table, and a few summary tables which keep up-to-date aggregated information about that table. Over time, every update to the main table has to change the summary tables. So, let's estimate that the updates to the summary tables add up to about 10 GB. Then, the summary tables are read 100 times, and let's say that they add up to 1 MB in size total. So, we have 5 GB + 10 GB + 0.1 GB = 15.1 GB.
Now, let's say the summary table wasn't there. We have 5 GB + 5 GB * 100 = 505 GB.
That's a big difference in total I/O. You could hack something into MySQL, I'm sure, but it would either not be ACID compliant or require application code changes. And it certainly would not be as straightforward as it is just using the obvious features.
Be that as it may,
So, you agree then? All I argued against was the claim that MySQL is more straightforward. I never said that people didn't use it successfully. Sometimes people get an idea in their head along the lines of "I don't need fancy bells and whistles, just something lean and mean". And then when it gets down to it, they end up making the situation much more complicated to make up for the fact that the product is missing features.
Some features complicate, and some features simplify. Triggers, views, rules, user-defined functions, user-defined aggregates, user-defined types, and functions can really simplify things when you need them.
I've seen all kinds of strange things that MySQL programmers do to make up for missing features.
I'm not sure whether this is for my argument or against it, but MySQL clearly thinks those features are important because they're trying to catch up now. And some of the important features are already there (or half there).
I like how you related it back to 1000 years ago (although 10000 might be a better example). What did people eat back then? Fruit, nuts, vegetables, grubs, and occasionally meat? Is there anything else?
One interesting fact is that fructose (sugar in fruit) does not spike insulin like other sugars/carbs. Or, at least, that's what I hear.
Let's assume there's a global warming problem caused by humans.
- pause -
Now what?
The problem with the environmental movements everywhere is that they never present a clear cost/benefit of any solution. Most people are willing to concede $X to improve the environment, but they don't have any idea what the costs and benefits of a particular action are.
If we take part in a plan to improve global warming, how much will it cost, and how much will it benefit us? Can it be stopped, or is it too late? If our economy collapses might it worsen the environment in other ways?
It's stupid to spend trillions of dollars choking our economy and the only benefit anyone has ever mentioned to me is "better safe than sorry". That's just no excuse for this kind of economic disruption. People need solid facts about how much it's helping.
I have a sure-fire way to prevent global warming. All we have to do is kill a random 2 billion people (excluding me of course). Is preventing global warming worth that cost? Yes or no? What about one billion people? 500 million? Huh?
So maybe the politicians aren't ignoring the problem because it doesn't exist. Maybe they're ignoring the problem because nobody has a solution.
It's just like that episode of Family Guy where they ignore the giant squid at their dinner table. Nothing they can do, so why bother suffering the costs of a futile and/or misguided effort?
Wrong. Most query work is done in parallel, hardware permitting. Queries cannot be run on multiple CPUs at once (at present), which is what you're referring to, but that's very deceiving. CPUs are generally not the bottleneck, in databases it usually has a lot more to do with RAM and disk.
[PostgreSQL lacks] any kind of partitioning,
Wrong. Have you seen version 8.1 with constraint exclusion? It's been out for a while now.
Without these features postgresql is *at best* only faster than oracle on index-oriented extremely transactional applications.
Where's the evidence? If you put PostgreSQL on nice hardware with RAID and perhaps replication, just like Oracle, I would expect the results to be fairly mixed and inconclusive. Some things Oracle would win, some thing PostgreSQL. I'm sure there are problem domains where PostgreSQL just won't fit and Oracle will, but I don't think you acurately characterized those domains.
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couldn't something be done about the OS so it could make some applications written for a single core take advantage of multiple cores?
That would seem to be VERY difficult to do without introducing many strange bugs. Software is made up of text, data, stack, and heap segments, all in a virtual address space. For a single-threaded application, there is one instruction pointer that points to the next instruction to be executed. So, the whole thing is very linear.
However, there are potentially things that a compiler could do. It has a lot more information about what variables depend on what other variables. Still hard, but seems more managable at the compiler level.
[conservatives] are quick to choose safety in the "safety vs. liberty" debate
First off, you're confusing conservatism as a philosophy with how people who call themselves "conservative" actually behave in office.
For the most part, politicians take freedoms away. There are many reasons (money primarily), but that's what happens, Democrat or Republican. But to do that, they have to give you a little freedom in one place, and take a lot of freedom somewhere else.
In a very general sense, democrats take away economic freedoms an give you back some personal freedoms. Republicans take away personal freedoms but give you economic freedoms.
To give a counterexample to your statement, how about "Safety net" type programs? One might say a liberal would give up economic freedom in exchange for economic safety.
From the wording you gave, it doesn't look as though you see economic liberty as an important liberty, but in my opinion it is every bit as important as free speech and more important than privacy.
but there sure seem to be a lot of people who just don't "get" the need for judicial oversight, fair representation in court or congress[...]
When someone is taking your freedoms away, they know damn well exactly what they are doing.
Some employees are liabilities.
For some, it's because they were never good employees. For others, they were once needed and now they do not produce a net positive.
On this planet, being hard working or loyal or nice is not -- by itself -- a guarantee that others owe you something. You need to be hard at work doing something useful. Otherwise you are a liability.
The main difference is, for every jew or christian that murders someone, there are 100 jews and christians who loudly denounce the act, and demand speedy justice.
Where are the muslims who demand a stop to all this? I want to hear the religious leaders saying that they don't support the violence over the cartoons, and that everyone who engages in it needs to be punished immediately.
It was found that by making the black and white schools separate, the separation made them inherently unequal.
That seems to be the analogy. I just don't agree. You aren't physically separating anyone, first of all. And there's nothing that says gay people can't get married in a hetersexual relationship. I would assume that many are. So it appears that treatment under the law is equal. If you were black you could not attend a white school under segregation.
The status of "eligible voter" was originally limited to "white male property owner over 21 years old".
I don't think that really works. "Eligible voter" means anyone able to vote. When you change who is eligible, I don't think that changes the meaning at all. It's not changing of language by government. "Marriage" would require such a redefinition to include same-sex couples.
claimed that homosexual lifestyle is a "choice"
Clearly there's a choice involved, and obviously that choice is affected by preference. Preference is a state that can only be affected by biological factors and/or environmental factors. I don't know which one affects the preference more, but it doesn't really matter either. I guess people try to claim its environmental so that they can assign "blame" or something, or somehow feel in control.
Upon a reread of my post, I found the following statement was unnecessary and insufficiently supported:
"If you need outside reassurance of your union, maybe it's best to just not get together?"
Which justifies your apt response.
What I originally meant was, I think most people who demand gay marriage are probably more interested in the outside endorsement of gay partnerships than the fine details of what gay marriage actually means. I still think that's true, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for allowances to be made. However, "marriage" has a meaning, and I don't think it's valid to redefine it for purely political reasons.
The post I was replying to was claiming that the entire issue was made up by the anti-gay crowd, which it isn't. The issue comes from both sides. I say just get the government out of the whole marriage thing, and it would go away.
You make a valid point, however.
Gay people can already do what they want. Gays are asking for the government to get involved through marriage.
Should the government get involved in heterosexual marriages? Maybe, maybe not. But the point is that gays are specifically asking the government to get involved in their partnerships.
If you need outside reassurance of your union, maybe it's best to just not get together?
Civil liberties means gay people can do pretty much whatever they want. It does not mean that they are entitled to government endorsement.
There are lots of companies offering support for PostgreSQL. If you need it to be a "big, enterprise-class" company, how about (as one example) Sun Microsystems, which offers 24/7 postgresql support?
Does MySQL support a write-ahead log or something similar, in case you don't have expensive hardware?
Oh, and I forgot to mention, many consumer-grade ide disks will actually lie about write caching (or so I've heard). The easiest way to tell for sure is if your transaction commit rate is higher than the disk rotation rate.
will the DB software be able to guarentee that the date is in a consistant state afterwards
PostgreSQL guarantees that so long as the error doesn't have something to do with the hard disk. Many people leave "write caching" enabled on the disk, meaning that no database or filesystem can guarantee consistency after a power failure. Also, of course bad sectors or something could destroy data. This is the same guarantee you get from Oracle.
But take PostgreSQL, run at whatever load you want, pull the plug, and it WILL be consistent (so long as write caching is off).
many legal ramifications
And many legals disclaimers, disclaiming any liability on behalf of Oracle or IBM.
Linux's VM is (anecdotal evidence, of course) really solid.
Can someone please explain where the OOM Killer fits in? Once I was running a PostgreSQL database on the same machine as a process with a memory leak. Linux decided to kill PostgreSQL. What gives?
How do other operating systems deal with that?
It sure doesn't seem that way to me. It seems to me like the pace of technological innovation is increasing and reaching consumers faster. You can probably find a few examples of mismanaged companies, but many companies still have huge research budgets and bring that new technology to consumers very quickly.
Think about how quickly multi-core processors are making it into the market. Is that because of short-term thinking? What about a company like IBM putting billions into Linux development, is that short-term thinking? What about the billions invested by drug companies to create better medications, that allow AIDS and cancer patients to live much longer than before?
Stored procedures are BAD BAD BAD
Do you realize what other features you give up when you give up stored procedures/functions?
-user-defined aggregates
-user-defined types
-functional indexes on user-defined functions
-set-returning functions
Sometimes you need these things for reasonable efficiency. Especially functional indexes! And user-defined types are an important part of the relational model.
because people like IBM and Oracle guarantee that when the power goes out, the transaction completed, or it didn't happen at all.
What kind of guarantees do they actually provide? For all of Oracle, IBM, and PostgreSQL the likelihood of a hardware error is far greater than the likelihood of a software error that leaves the database inconsistent.
So what, will Oracle pay you money if a software failure occurs? What about a hardware failure?
From a technical standpoint, PostgreSQL is probably more trustworthy when it comes to data integrity. Oracle is often installed on better hardware, but that's not the fault of PostgreSQL.
Once I did a hybrid python/C project because C by itself was impossible for me to maintain in the given time constraints.
It worked amazingly well. There's a little bit of interfacing work that needs to be done, but I found that, in that project at least, the C code didn't need to be modified very often.
It very often DOES simplify to use two programming languages.
That's certainly a possibility. But marriage law is based on common human behaviors, and differences between men and women, that have been established over a long time. If you operate outside of that, it's probably best to define your relationship exactly as you want in a written contract.
There are things about marriage law that clearly don't apply to gay couples, for instance, it's legally assumed that you're the father if your wife has a child (unless proven otherwise).
I don't think we should arbitrarily do a global search-and-replace on marriage law and hope for the best. What about 3 people that want to get married? What about people and animals? There are bound to be some nasty disputes.
I'd much rather the government just get out entirely. It would need to happen slowly, but it could be done.
And by the way, why would any sane person want the government to get involved where they aren't already? Gay people have a clean slate, no government to screw it up. Nobody bothering them. They decide what they want, and make their own choices. It's like if you had a little uptopia hidden away, and then all of a sudden you get an urge for federal highway funds.
I said culture forces them. Not the government. The reason a lot of couples get married is a feeling of obligation and peer pressure, which is a cultural thing.
You made a good point, but the analogy doesn't necessarily work.
Morality is personal*, and government-mandated segregation is considered morally wrong. So is race discrimination in public businesses, like a theater. You can't arbitrarily attach the same concept of a moral wrong to denying homosexual marriage. Indeed, that's what the whole debate is about.
The debate is more important because government is involved in marriage. The real debate should focus on these questions:
(1) Why is government involved in marriage?
Because many women would be at a severe financial disadvantage during and after a marriage with no government involvement (if all else were equal). Many women want to provide their part of marriage by raising children, and making life easier for other members of the family. Many men prefer to provide their part of marriage by providing income to the family through a career. If that is the case, after the kids leave home, the man could just leave the woman. At that point the man is probably at his highest earning power, and the woman probably would have no career or experience at all, no savings, little physical attractiveness, and not much earning ability because she's not at her physical labor peak.
I am not suggesting that this is how it should be, or how it always is. I am claiming that marriage law intervenes to provide alternative incentives and alternative outcomes. In theory, if the government did not involve itself, the marriage could be settled with a private marriage contract. However, the man would probably just not sign it, just like a woman might refuse a prenuptial agreement today. The culture demands that, if a child is on the way, a marriage happens, contract or not. The power rests with the person who benefits most from the default case, which is no contract at all. When two people are culturally forced together, the contract can become a zero-sum game (unlike normal contracts, which are mutually beneficial), because often the only thing to negotiate is who gets the money generated before the marriage, during the marriage, and after the marriage.
(2) Do those same reasons from #1 apply to homosexual marriage?
No.
(3) Do those same reasons from #1 justify government involvement?
Maybe. If the government backed out, society would need to step up and change the culture to demand that certain agreements are made along with the marriage. Perhaps it would be good, because people would understand what they're signing up for, and it would test their true compatibility and commitment. It could be bad if the negotiations got heated while a child is on the way.
And all of this is intertwined with child support laws. That's another long debate.
* By this I mean that either it's relative if you're a moral relativist, or if you're a moral absolutist than you still need to decide on your interpretation of morality, which could be different for everyone. I'm not declaring morailty to necessarily be relative or absolute, just personal.
You still pay the same amount on disk I/O (actually more), you just spread it out.
Not true at all. Let's count some I/O in an example. Let's say you have a 5 GB table, and a few summary tables which keep up-to-date aggregated information about that table. Over time, every update to the main table has to change the summary tables. So, let's estimate that the updates to the summary tables add up to about 10 GB. Then, the summary tables are read 100 times, and let's say that they add up to 1 MB in size total. So, we have 5 GB + 10 GB + 0.1 GB = 15.1 GB.
Now, let's say the summary table wasn't there. We have 5 GB + 5 GB * 100 = 505 GB.
That's a big difference in total I/O. You could hack something into MySQL, I'm sure, but it would either not be ACID compliant or require application code changes. And it certainly would not be as straightforward as it is just using the obvious features.
Be that as it may,
So, you agree then? All I argued against was the claim that MySQL is more straightforward. I never said that people didn't use it successfully. Sometimes people get an idea in their head along the lines of "I don't need fancy bells and whistles, just something lean and mean". And then when it gets down to it, they end up making the situation much more complicated to make up for the fact that the product is missing features.
Some features complicate, and some features simplify. Triggers, views, rules, user-defined functions, user-defined aggregates, user-defined types, and functions can really simplify things when you need them.
I've seen all kinds of strange things that MySQL programmers do to make up for missing features.
I'm not sure whether this is for my argument or against it, but MySQL clearly thinks those features are important because they're trying to catch up now. And some of the important features are already there (or half there).
Thanks, that was informative.
I like how you related it back to 1000 years ago (although 10000 might be a better example). What did people eat back then? Fruit, nuts, vegetables, grubs, and occasionally meat? Is there anything else?
One interesting fact is that fructose (sugar in fruit) does not spike insulin like other sugars/carbs. Or, at least, that's what I hear.
Let's assume there's a global warming problem caused by humans.
- pause -
Now what?
The problem with the environmental movements everywhere is that they never present a clear cost/benefit of any solution. Most people are willing to concede $X to improve the environment, but they don't have any idea what the costs and benefits of a particular action are.
If we take part in a plan to improve global warming, how much will it cost, and how much will it benefit us? Can it be stopped, or is it too late? If our economy collapses might it worsen the environment in other ways?
It's stupid to spend trillions of dollars choking our economy and the only benefit anyone has ever mentioned to me is "better safe than sorry". That's just no excuse for this kind of economic disruption. People need solid facts about how much it's helping.
I have a sure-fire way to prevent global warming. All we have to do is kill a random 2 billion people (excluding me of course). Is preventing global warming worth that cost? Yes or no? What about one billion people? 500 million? Huh?
So maybe the politicians aren't ignoring the problem because it doesn't exist. Maybe they're ignoring the problem because nobody has a solution.
It's just like that episode of Family Guy where they ignore the giant squid at their dinner table. Nothing they can do, so why bother suffering the costs of a futile and/or misguided effort?
Both postgresql and mysql lack query parallelism,
Wrong. Most query work is done in parallel, hardware permitting. Queries cannot be run on multiple CPUs at once (at present), which is what you're referring to, but that's very deceiving. CPUs are generally not the bottleneck, in databases it usually has a lot more to do with RAM and disk.
[PostgreSQL lacks] any kind of partitioning,
Wrong. Have you seen version 8.1 with constraint exclusion? It's been out for a while now.
Without these features postgresql is *at best* only faster than oracle on index-oriented extremely transactional applications.
Where's the evidence? If you put PostgreSQL on nice hardware with RAID and perhaps replication, just like Oracle, I would expect the results to be fairly mixed and inconclusive. Some things Oracle would win, some thing PostgreSQL. I'm sure there are problem domains where PostgreSQL just won't fit and Oracle will, but I don't think you acurately characterized those domains.