For normal social-type drinking, the highest BAC is usually achieved within 30 minutes after completion of consumption, though it could take as long as 60 minutes.
And it can be longer (up to 2 hours, according to the link).
If someone is close to the limit, absorption rate might be a factor -- and might (quite reasonably) put an innocent person in jail.
Now, you could argue that the person still shouldn't be driving, etc. But this will usually be a factor close to the limit, and the limit is already quite conservative (i.e. if a typical person has about 3 drinks, then drives, they could go to jail and pay thousands in fines).
I would be in favor of using a graduated scale where it started out by just enhancing other infractions. In other words, maybe 0.08 is just a ticket (lets say you were pulled over for a broken tail light), but 0.08 and speeding gets something a little worse, and save the harshest penalties for people that are actually drunk and driving recklessly.
I didn't see that claim. There is a difference between making a constitutional argument about the validity of a search, and arguing that the crime itself is "OK".
Even if it was a magical black box, it could be subject to scientific double-blind testing and you could measure the precision & accuracy of the magical black box.
I'm not so sure. There are a lot of variables that need to be controlled for a testing device. You can test it a million times, but maybe it doesn't account for the high pressure and low humidity conditions in, say, Death Valley (hypothetically).
If the person doesn't have insight into the test itself, they have no way of knowing that their particular circumstances make the test less accurate.
Many lab tests are fairly straightforward. But a breath test is complex, apparently so complex that it requires source code that is a trade secret. Surely it must make many assumptions, and if one of those assumptions is wrong because of some unusual circumstance, the defense should be able to challenge it.
Technically speaking, that does not prove guilt either, unless the blood sample is taken very close to the time the defendant is driving (i.e. not a half hour later).
There is approximately zero chance that Oracle uses any code from MySQL in the Oracle database engine.
It just doesn't make any sense -- the SQL dialect issues you bring up stretch from the parser down through the optimizer all the way to the executor. There's no way these different layers would match up well enough between the two systems that they would get any benefit from the existing source code. In fact, I've heard that MySQL doesn't even separate the optimizer and executor.
Even if they did want to provide a MySQL bug-compatible mode for Oracle (which I doubt), they would only use the existing MySQL code as documentation of the MySQL behavior. They can do that without owning the copyright.
Maybe they could make MySQL output translated SQL to Oracle (or something similar), but I doubt they'd do that, either.
From what I understand, Oracle is fairly interested in the details of an OS -- not even counting all the Solaris engineers they just acquired.
Oracle has already implemented their own NFS, for example, and they have put quite a bit of work into bypassing the filesystem and making their own buffer cache.
That doesn't match the profile of a company that just wants to change the paintwork and rebrand.
Re:InnoDB and MySQL together
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
Yes, now they could (in theory) ship with InnoDB as the default storage engine, and even better, make the catalogs use InnoDB so that it's crash-safe during DDL operation.
How can I possibly debate this issue with you or anyone else when the climate change camp gets to count both warmer and colder temperatures at the poles as favorable for their position?
I second this question. There is some kind of inconsistency in this thread.
Are poles made colder by global warming? If so, then why all the pictures of polar ice falling into the sea and polar animals losing their habitat?
If, instead, the poles are made warmer by global warming, why is the polar ice increasing in parts of the antarctic?
Most of them are old gasbags with lots of the wrong kind of life experiences.
I don't think it's entirely explained by inexperience, nor by "wrong" experience.
I think it's much better explained by making an opinion a part of one's identity. Once an opinion is part of one's identity, it will act as a filter for any facts that may contradict it.
I recognized that some of my opinions needed to be changed fairly early on, and I think I avoided making them too much a part of my identity to change. However, I recognize that some of my opinions did become a part of my identity, so I still need to be careful when acting on them.
If someone appears irrational the best thing to do is recognize two things:
1. They have probably made the opinion a part of their identity, and may be using unsound arguments to support it.
2. If the person is otherwise intelligent, there is probably some underlying validity to their position.
In other words, their argument might not be sound, but their position be valid.
A good test for yourself is to pick a few controversial topics that you have strong opinions about. For each one, try to imagine what facts would need to change for you to change positions.
Sometimes you'll find that quite reasonable adjustments in statistics or facts, some of which you might not know with much precision anyway, could cause you to switch sides.
Who cares how much it costs as long as it sounds like a good idea? And to me, sitting in the middle of a city, it sounds like a great idea. And if it's a great idea here in the middle of the city, it's a great idea everywhere. Money is just numbers in a bank account, but trains are part of a vision that I want to become a reality.
See, people just don't want to ride trains. But they are just ignorant, and if we build trains and tax gasoline more, eventually they'll learn to like it.
I know what's best for everyone, and I can prove it using logic and a series of axioms that I assume to be true. Your facts just get in the way, and mine are mostly right anyway.
Well, the U.S. is a republic. Out of the three branches of government:
* The judiciary is entirely appointed (the antithesis of democracy)
* The President is elected indirectly
* The Senate originally was selected by the state legislature, but now both houses are elected.
On top of that, we have a Constitution that can override the will of the people unless they have a super-super majority to pass an amendment. And many laws require supermajorities, and almost all laws are passed indirectly through representatives (although some states have a proposition system, like California).
It's certainly not a pure democracy, so you would need to change a lot to accomplish what you want.
And I do not wish for a pure democracy. I just don't think it's desirable.
I prefer my vote counts,...and yet it never does in a presidential election. How stupid is that?
It would probably not count even if it was a pure popular vote.
There was a difference of 10M popular votes in the last election. That's a big enough gap that nobody's vote would really count for anything more than a vote in California or Texas does today.
But isn't that pretty much the entire Libertarian platform? Make government smaller and we'll be better off.
No, it's "make the government less powerful, and we'll be more free".
Freedom and economic well-being often go well together, but sometimes freedom comes at the cost of economic well-being, and sometimes that cost is worth paying.
Libertarians know their party members aren't magically incorruptable. That's why they push for government that is LIMITED in what it can do. Limit what government can do, and you limit what corruption is possible and probable.
Spot on.
Libertarian government would definitely change a lot of lives. It would probably result in the deaths of literally millions of Americans.
Where did that come from? Sure, if the entire list of federal laws were replaced by the Libertarian platform copied-and-pasted from the party's website tomorrow, there would be a lot of upheaval.
But really, the Libertarian platform is not about pure rugged self-reliance. It's about removing certain powers from the government -- particularly the federal government. This leaves those solutions up to local governments, or ad-hoc social organizations (like families, churches, community organizations, charities, friends) which don't have the power to arrest you, kill you, or confiscate your property for not participating.
I fail to see how being anti-war, anti-empire, anti-drug war, pro-privacy, and pro-freedom are characteristics of the far right.
The Libertarian platform is well-defined.
"Far Right" is not -- it's used pejoratively to represent people all over the political spectrum. It's even been used to describe the Nazis, even though they were explicitly socialist.
Similarly for "Far Left" -- which has been used to describe even Libertarians.
The best political terms are the ones that mean different things to different people. For instance, "Change" is a positive-sounding message that means contradictory things among different people.
If you live in Ohio or Florida, vote for "the lesser of two evils".
If you live in California or Texas, vote for whomever you'd like. Your vote doesn't matter in the general election, so you might as well make it count for something, like making a 3rd party more prominent.
This is one thing I like about the electoral college system.
They think their company is worth a lot more than what the stock market says their shares are worth and a lot more than IBM is willing to pay, and they may very well be right.
Then they should buy the shares back themselves.
What they are doing is playing with other people's money. The vast majority of investors obviously don't think that Sun is worth much more than around $3-4B, which was their market cap before the IBM/Sun announcement.
It's appalling that they would bet their investors' money on their own inflated sense of self-worth, contrary to their investors' wishes (which is evident by the 25% drop today).
They have a good chance to justify a higher price given their IP and how crazy stock market valuation is.
This sounds like the same logic that Yahoo! used to reject Microsoft's bid.
The fact is, Sun should be looking out for the shareholders, and the correct move for the shareholders is to sell when someone is offering a 75% premium on the stock (or whatever insane premium it was).
There's a big difference between a "typical application" and a "typical MySQL application".
Many applications are written to work with multiple databases. But one of MySQL's strongest points is that there are a lot of applications written specifically for MySQL that don't work with anything else.
A fork of MySQL is unlikely to be very strong on the technical merits anytime soon -- DBMSs take a long time to get right, and the features they borrow from the mainline are obviously already available in mainline MySQL.
Similarly, a fork of MySQL is unlikely to have a strong community anytime soon. It takes a while to really get a strong community.
So, what does a MySQL fork have to offer? If it can't at least work with the existing MySQL applications, it will probably fail, which is exactly what I said.
Personally, I don't think that MySQL or any of its derivatives are really going to see much success over the next few years.
It takes a lot to build a community around such a fork. If a "typical MySQL application" can't substitute Fork XYZ for MySQL, Fork XYZ will probably fail.
If you're serious about building a business that will depend on information, picking up a random MySQL fork because the developers have some ambitious ideas is not responsible. If you really like MySQL (for whatever reason) stick to the mainline MySQL, and hope the cool new stuff gets merged back; if not, pick something that's not MySQL at all and is not going through as much turmoil.
I just don't see how average Americans tolerate companies who fire 5000 of their own (American) employees to raise enough cash to buy another company to increase their stock margins.
IBM employs a lot of people. Any company, in order to stay healthy, must get rid of people that are less productive, and then hire new people who are more productive.
It takes a lot of effort to fire people. Many times, companies just use a "bad economy" as a good excuse to get rid of clock-watchers they have wanted to jettison for a long time. Then they call it a "layoff" so that nobody can really complain.
Then, they wait a little while (so that the people they laid off aren't insulted) and hire more people.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, sometimes alcohol can take a significant amount of time to be absorbed, particularly with food involved.
See:
http://www.forcon.ca/learning/alcohol.html
And it can be longer (up to 2 hours, according to the link).
If someone is close to the limit, absorption rate might be a factor -- and might (quite reasonably) put an innocent person in jail.
Now, you could argue that the person still shouldn't be driving, etc. But this will usually be a factor close to the limit, and the limit is already quite conservative (i.e. if a typical person has about 3 drinks, then drives, they could go to jail and pay thousands in fines).
I would be in favor of using a graduated scale where it started out by just enhancing other infractions. In other words, maybe 0.08 is just a ticket (lets say you were pulled over for a broken tail light), but 0.08 and speeding gets something a little worse, and save the harshest penalties for people that are actually drunk and driving recklessly.
So you think driving while drunk is OK?
I didn't see that claim. There is a difference between making a constitutional argument about the validity of a search, and arguing that the crime itself is "OK".
Even if it was a magical black box, it could be subject to scientific double-blind testing and you could measure the precision & accuracy of the magical black box.
I'm not so sure. There are a lot of variables that need to be controlled for a testing device. You can test it a million times, but maybe it doesn't account for the high pressure and low humidity conditions in, say, Death Valley (hypothetically).
If the person doesn't have insight into the test itself, they have no way of knowing that their particular circumstances make the test less accurate.
Many lab tests are fairly straightforward. But a breath test is complex, apparently so complex that it requires source code that is a trade secret. Surely it must make many assumptions, and if one of those assumptions is wrong because of some unusual circumstance, the defense should be able to challenge it.
Technically speaking, that does not prove guilt either, unless the blood sample is taken very close to the time the defendant is driving (i.e. not a half hour later).
What's more concerning is IBMs partnership with EnterpriseDB [cnet.com], which is based on PostgreSQL.
Can you elaborate? Why is that a big problem?
There is approximately zero chance that Oracle uses any code from MySQL in the Oracle database engine.
It just doesn't make any sense -- the SQL dialect issues you bring up stretch from the parser down through the optimizer all the way to the executor. There's no way these different layers would match up well enough between the two systems that they would get any benefit from the existing source code. In fact, I've heard that MySQL doesn't even separate the optimizer and executor.
Even if they did want to provide a MySQL bug-compatible mode for Oracle (which I doubt), they would only use the existing MySQL code as documentation of the MySQL behavior. They can do that without owning the copyright.
Maybe they could make MySQL output translated SQL to Oracle (or something similar), but I doubt they'd do that, either.
having to do all the work yourself
From what I understand, Oracle is fairly interested in the details of an OS -- not even counting all the Solaris engineers they just acquired.
Oracle has already implemented their own NFS, for example, and they have put quite a bit of work into bypassing the filesystem and making their own buffer cache.
That doesn't match the profile of a company that just wants to change the paintwork and rebrand.
Yes, now they could (in theory) ship with InnoDB as the default storage engine, and even better, make the catalogs use InnoDB so that it's crash-safe during DDL operation.
How can I possibly debate this issue with you or anyone else when the climate change camp gets to count both warmer and colder temperatures at the poles as favorable for their position?
I second this question. There is some kind of inconsistency in this thread.
Are poles made colder by global warming? If so, then why all the pictures of polar ice falling into the sea and polar animals losing their habitat?
If, instead, the poles are made warmer by global warming, why is the polar ice increasing in parts of the antarctic?
Most of them are old gasbags with lots of the wrong kind of life experiences.
I don't think it's entirely explained by inexperience, nor by "wrong" experience.
I think it's much better explained by making an opinion a part of one's identity. Once an opinion is part of one's identity, it will act as a filter for any facts that may contradict it.
I recognized that some of my opinions needed to be changed fairly early on, and I think I avoided making them too much a part of my identity to change. However, I recognize that some of my opinions did become a part of my identity, so I still need to be careful when acting on them.
If someone appears irrational the best thing to do is recognize two things:
1. They have probably made the opinion a part of their identity, and may be using unsound arguments to support it.
2. If the person is otherwise intelligent, there is probably some underlying validity to their position.
In other words, their argument might not be sound, but their position be valid.
A good test for yourself is to pick a few controversial topics that you have strong opinions about. For each one, try to imagine what facts would need to change for you to change positions.
Sometimes you'll find that quite reasonable adjustments in statistics or facts, some of which you might not know with much precision anyway, could cause you to switch sides.
Don't ruin our "vision" with boring facts!
Who cares how much it costs as long as it sounds like a good idea? And to me, sitting in the middle of a city, it sounds like a great idea. And if it's a great idea here in the middle of the city, it's a great idea everywhere. Money is just numbers in a bank account, but trains are part of a vision that I want to become a reality.
See, people just don't want to ride trains. But they are just ignorant, and if we build trains and tax gasoline more, eventually they'll learn to like it.
I know what's best for everyone, and I can prove it using logic and a series of axioms that I assume to be true. Your facts just get in the way, and mine are mostly right anyway.
Being such a large, open land this makes perfect sense.
Trains make sense for large, open land? Please explain, because I would have thought the opposite.
[The NYC subway] system should be the model for the whole country.
Huh? The U.S. is a huge area, and not everyone wants to live in the heart of the city, which is the only place a subway makes sense.
What works well one place doesn't necessarily work well everywhere. That's what makes different places different.
i believe in democracy
Well, the U.S. is a republic. Out of the three branches of government:
* The judiciary is entirely appointed (the antithesis of democracy)
* The President is elected indirectly
* The Senate originally was selected by the state legislature, but now both houses are elected.
On top of that, we have a Constitution that can override the will of the people unless they have a super-super majority to pass an amendment. And many laws require supermajorities, and almost all laws are passed indirectly through representatives (although some states have a proposition system, like California).
It's certainly not a pure democracy, so you would need to change a lot to accomplish what you want.
And I do not wish for a pure democracy. I just don't think it's desirable.
I prefer my vote counts, ...and yet it never does in a presidential election. How stupid is that?
It would probably not count even if it was a pure popular vote.
There was a difference of 10M popular votes in the last election. That's a big enough gap that nobody's vote would really count for anything more than a vote in California or Texas does today.
Fuck the electoral college system.
Don't be so quick to throw the system away. It tends to make elections closer, which could be seen as a benefit.
But isn't that pretty much the entire Libertarian platform? Make government smaller and we'll be better off.
No, it's "make the government less powerful, and we'll be more free".
Freedom and economic well-being often go well together, but sometimes freedom comes at the cost of economic well-being, and sometimes that cost is worth paying.
Libertarians know their party members aren't magically incorruptable. That's why they push for government that is LIMITED in what it can do. Limit what government can do, and you limit what corruption is possible and probable.
Spot on.
Libertarian government would definitely change a lot of lives. It would probably result in the deaths of literally millions of Americans.
Where did that come from? Sure, if the entire list of federal laws were replaced by the Libertarian platform copied-and-pasted from the party's website tomorrow, there would be a lot of upheaval.
But really, the Libertarian platform is not about pure rugged self-reliance. It's about removing certain powers from the government -- particularly the federal government. This leaves those solutions up to local governments, or ad-hoc social organizations (like families, churches, community organizations, charities, friends) which don't have the power to arrest you, kill you, or confiscate your property for not participating.
I fail to see how being anti-war, anti-empire, anti-drug war, pro-privacy, and pro-freedom are characteristics of the far right.
The Libertarian platform is well-defined.
"Far Right" is not -- it's used pejoratively to represent people all over the political spectrum. It's even been used to describe the Nazis, even though they were explicitly socialist.
Similarly for "Far Left" -- which has been used to describe even Libertarians.
The best political terms are the ones that mean different things to different people. For instance, "Change" is a positive-sounding message that means contradictory things among different people.
Votes only matter in close elections. Period.
If you live in Ohio or Florida, vote for "the lesser of two evils".
If you live in California or Texas, vote for whomever you'd like. Your vote doesn't matter in the general election, so you might as well make it count for something, like making a 3rd party more prominent.
This is one thing I like about the electoral college system.
They think their company is worth a lot more than what the stock market says their shares are worth and a lot more than IBM is willing to pay, and they may very well be right.
Then they should buy the shares back themselves.
What they are doing is playing with other people's money. The vast majority of investors obviously don't think that Sun is worth much more than around $3-4B, which was their market cap before the IBM/Sun announcement.
It's appalling that they would bet their investors' money on their own inflated sense of self-worth, contrary to their investors' wishes (which is evident by the 25% drop today).
it sounds like IBM really didn't want them after all.
They were offering an insane premium on the price. It sounds like they wanted Sun to me.
They have a good chance to justify a higher price given their IP and how crazy stock market valuation is.
This sounds like the same logic that Yahoo! used to reject Microsoft's bid.
The fact is, Sun should be looking out for the shareholders, and the correct move for the shareholders is to sell when someone is offering a 75% premium on the stock (or whatever insane premium it was).
There's a big difference between a "typical application" and a "typical MySQL application".
Many applications are written to work with multiple databases. But one of MySQL's strongest points is that there are a lot of applications written specifically for MySQL that don't work with anything else.
A fork of MySQL is unlikely to be very strong on the technical merits anytime soon -- DBMSs take a long time to get right, and the features they borrow from the mainline are obviously already available in mainline MySQL.
Similarly, a fork of MySQL is unlikely to have a strong community anytime soon. It takes a while to really get a strong community.
So, what does a MySQL fork have to offer? If it can't at least work with the existing MySQL applications, it will probably fail, which is exactly what I said.
Personally, I don't think that MySQL or any of its derivatives are really going to see much success over the next few years.
It takes a lot to build a community around such a fork. If a "typical MySQL application" can't substitute Fork XYZ for MySQL, Fork XYZ will probably fail.
If you're serious about building a business that will depend on information, picking up a random MySQL fork because the developers have some ambitious ideas is not responsible. If you really like MySQL (for whatever reason) stick to the mainline MySQL, and hope the cool new stuff gets merged back; if not, pick something that's not MySQL at all and is not going through as much turmoil.
I just don't see how average Americans tolerate companies who fire 5000 of their own (American) employees to raise enough cash to buy another company to increase their stock margins.
IBM employs a lot of people. Any company, in order to stay healthy, must get rid of people that are less productive, and then hire new people who are more productive.
It takes a lot of effort to fire people. Many times, companies just use a "bad economy" as a good excuse to get rid of clock-watchers they have wanted to jettison for a long time. Then they call it a "layoff" so that nobody can really complain.
Then, they wait a little while (so that the people they laid off aren't insulted) and hire more people.