"If this is your real concern, shouldn't you be lobbying for the abolition of the police and the army, rather than the FDA? After all, the government cannot protect you without being facists, right?"
No. the police protect you from criminals -- people who are actively infringing on your rights. They are also needed to enforce contracts. There is a basic necessity for such things, but not so much that they control what is happening. Government control of privately-owned business is fascism.
If someone cheats or lies or steals, that's a problem and they should be punished. If someone has lower quality control than you want, DON'T BUY FROM THEM. If they are lying about their quality control, that's one thing. But just because you don't like their standards doesn't mean you have the right to force the government to change their practices. You can simply not buy their product.
For the record, I'm conservative, not libertarian. I think libertarianism is just a different form of utopianism.
"The free market did nothing to stop that. There's a happy medium in there somewhere."
I think the problem is that, right now, consumers are expecting the government to protect them -- something the government ultimately cannot do without becoming a fascist entity. If the expectation of protection were removed, and citizens formed their own regulatory agencies that used trademarks to clearly identify what was approved or not, then citizens could choose to accept or reject the wisdom of the regulatory agencies.
The FDA kept Ketocal (which cures or nearly cures child epilepsy in most cases) out of the US market for years simply because it disagreed with the way that Ketocal counted carbohydrates listed on their packaging (Ketocal said 3, the FDA said 11).
"Ofcourse, big business has been very successful at spreading the meme that market regulation is bad for the market."
I think you're mixing concepts here. Market regulation _is_ generally bad for the market. Antitrust regulation is good for the market.
Big companies really welcome true market regulation, because it prevents smaller players from entering the field. For example, the reasons drug prices are so high is because regulation makes it virtually impossible for small companies to compete. Therefore, the only people willing to lose money for 5-10 years before becoming profitable are those whose only goal is to become absurdly profitable.
The problem w/ payola is that it has a MAJOR adverse affect for people who don't participate. It ruins the free market, turning it into an oligopoly.
To see what the power of payola was, one record company decided to NOT participate when Pink Floyd was on their The Wall tour in Los Angeles, one of the biggest music events of the time. The song (I forgot which) was a hit across the country, but was not played by a single radio station in Los Angeles in the week before the concert.
There's a book about this called "Hit Men" or something like that. It's pretty interesting stuff. A basic overview is at:
The problem is that real code gets messy. Especially if you have to code a bizzare state machine for handling data from a separate program. Some edge cases may be way too subtle to notice from the code.
There's been many cases where I've needed to document simple code with long explanations, simply because there are so many ways that seem right which are really wrong. Especially when you do something that doesn't seem optimal, because the optimal solution has subtle problems that aren't obvious.
Often times, without enough documentation, future programmers will try to "fix" what appear to be errors or suboptimal designs in your code, which are really there to take care of unusual code-paths.
Looks like PGSQL already fits your bill. For the windows installer, you'd have to contact a company like CommandPrompt.com until PG releases version 8.0. (8.0 beta 3 was recently released).
"Do you think because MyISAM isn't transactional that the whole database isn't?"
Transactionality isn't the only part of data integrity. One of the most glaring errors of MySQL is that inserting an integer value too large into a column gets TRUNCATED instead of getting an error.
I've heard of other problems relating to foreign key handling, but do not remember them.
"The only place I see PgSQL winning the performance war is the query optimizer."
For complicated programs, this is the kicker, too. And the optimizer has only gotten better. You can now do UNIONs and GROUP BYs in views, and they even can get optimized based on the rest of the query.
In addition, write-ahead logging can give dramatic speed improvements for insert/update-heavy databases. Also, PG's MVCC also adds performance to insert/update-heavy databases.
So, you have better performance by the query optimizer for complex queries, and better performance for update/inserts through WAL and MVCC. It looks like MySQL's performance gain is minimal, and only on small applications. I wonder if those applications might be sped up if they just used more advanced queries?
"There's also the universal availability and familiarity when it comes to the mysql protocol and libraries."
I don't see anything special there. In Perl, it's the same no matter what DB you use. In PHP, it's the same no matter what DB you use. The only difference is that the query language under PGSQL is much more comprehensive than MySQL.
The protocol doesn't really matter -- under Windows you can install an adapter for either, in Perl you can install an adapter for either, same w/ PHP.
Just FYI - the biggest thing I run into on a daily basis is the fact that on Mozilla (and all CSS-compliant browers), width refers to the client-area only, while in IE it also refers to the padding (and margins and borders?).
Therefore, if you need both width and padding, you simply create two divs, one embedded in the other, one with the padding, and one with the width.
Also, I usually have a standard CSS prelude that sets borders and margins to 0 on a lot of elements , and sets the display type of images to "block".
"1. How many phones are susceptible to worms and employers?"
Pretty much any Nokia phone.
"4. A cell phone that was constantly transmitting would run up a huge bill, making it either cost-ineffective in the case of employers or easily detectable in the case of a worm."
Not really. Most of these have plans so that in-company calls are free.
If they have cell phones, they already have the issue. In fact, I think there was a slashdot article about doing this easily with most bluetooth cell phones.
Asterisk sucks for newbies. Sorry. http://www.voip-info.org/ (site seems to be currently down) has a lot of information, but it's hard to hash out as a newbie. Took me a half a day just to get internal extensions to call each other. Once you "get" it, it's pretty easy.
When I have time, I'm planning on writing a tutorial.
The site mentioned above has a lot of examples listed. Read them, and it will help you understand.
"Sure, it sucks to either go without phone or internet, it is worse of BOTH are out."
We are keeping our land lines. VoIP is for our _internal_ phone network. We can use it to make long-distance calls, but we can also set it up to use our land lines _automatically_ if our VoIP provider is down.
We have a pretty small network, so there isn't anything that would bring the _network_ down. If we lost a switch it would take all of 3 seconds to replace it. If our Internet servers and firewall went down, it wouldn't affect the computers which already have received DHCP addresses nor our VoIP box. This could be a problem in bigger companies where their networks have huge spanning trees of switches, but is not a problem in our 30-person office.
This seems much more intelligent and noble than what the current nobel peace prize winner seems to think (she thinks that AIDS is a bioterrorism virus developed by mysterious westerners in order to control black people).
"As for your 35 million figure, it isn't a baby unless its wanted and born."
What does being _wanted_ have to do with being a baby? Are you not a human if people don't like you?
"I'd love to see all of the conservatives who are against abortion stomach the taxes it would take to financially support the social programs that would be needed to raise these unwanted kids."
Every heard of adoption? Do you know how hard it is for barren parents to adopt a child because of the low number of children available for adoption?
In addition, the point that conservatives always make is not that spending money to help people is bad, but rather that the government is the wrong vehicle to do so, being how bad the government is at ever helping people either effectively or efficiently.
"You are an utter moron if you think that someone who is unopposed to abortion commits a crime is enacting "pro-abortion murder"."
If someone kills a doctor to prevent them from performing an abortion, that is considered a "pro-life murder". So, likewise, if someone kills a woman to prevent her from having a baby, why should that not be considered a "pro-abortion murder"? I'm perfectly willing to do away with both categorizations, giving that in each instance it is marginal freaks and not mainstreamers doing it, but if you set up the category for "pro-life murders" you have to be willing to accept a similar category for "pro-abortion murder".
Of course the pro-abortion movement's history of violence has been completely swept under the rug. Not counting the 35 million babies they've killed, there are large (actually larger) numbers of violent acts committed by pro-abortionists who want someone to have an abortion than by anti-abortionists who are trying to keep someone from having an abortion.
This site is very biased, but it at least gives you another perspective to the violence that has occurred, and how the media never reports it.
From the site:
Did you hear anything from the media when pro-abortion activist Eileen Orstein Janezic shot pro-life activist minister and radio talk show host Jerry Simon through his living room window? After killing Simon, she held police at bay with a pistol for six hours while spouting quotes from Anton LaVey's "Satanic Bible." In 1994, a jury found her guilty of murder and sentenced her to life in prison. During her trial, she admitted that she had shot Simon to prove her love of Satan.
Did you hear anything when pro-abortionist Byron Looper, who was running against pro-life state Senator Tommy Burks for a political office, shot him through the left eye with a large-caliber pistol? After he murdered Burks, Looper boasted that "I did it, man, I did it! I killed that dude."
Why didn't you hear about these murders?...
The murder of pregnant women by pro-abortion men happens far more often than most people imagine. At least three studies have shown that the most common cause of fatalities among pregnant women is murder, and statistics show that almost one-third of these are due to pro-abortion men who kill their wives or girlfriends simply because they are pregnant.
"2) The "fix" according to the article is not bad at all.. Setting the check in global doesn't amount to 8.7 million hours of lost productivity."
Did you account for the amount of time the administrator spends in Slashdot complaining? I mean, gosh, this has even rendered the open-source comunity lost hours of productivity to complain about Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ie, you are regulating just how much market share a market participant can have."
That's incorrect. You are actually regulating the _behavior_ of entities which have a large marketshare.
"Translation: Market regulation is bad for the market. Market regulation is good for the market."
Or maybe I have a more nuanced position than you're willing to give me credit for?
"If this is your real concern, shouldn't you be lobbying for the abolition of the police and the army, rather than the FDA? After all, the government cannot protect you without being facists, right?"
No. the police protect you from criminals -- people who are actively infringing on your rights. They are also needed to enforce contracts. There is a basic necessity for such things, but not so much that they control what is happening. Government control of privately-owned business is fascism.
If someone cheats or lies or steals, that's a problem and they should be punished. If someone has lower quality control than you want, DON'T BUY FROM THEM. If they are lying about their quality control, that's one thing. But just because you don't like their standards doesn't mean you have the right to force the government to change their practices. You can simply not buy their product.
For the record, I'm conservative, not libertarian. I think libertarianism is just a different form of utopianism.
"The free market did nothing to stop that. There's a happy medium in there somewhere."
I think the problem is that, right now, consumers are expecting the government to protect them -- something the government ultimately cannot do without becoming a fascist entity. If the expectation of protection were removed, and citizens formed their own regulatory agencies that used trademarks to clearly identify what was approved or not, then citizens could choose to accept or reject the wisdom of the regulatory agencies.
The FDA kept Ketocal (which cures or nearly cures child epilepsy in most cases) out of the US market for years simply because it disagreed with the way that Ketocal counted carbohydrates listed on their packaging (Ketocal said 3, the FDA said 11).
"Ofcourse, big business has been very successful at spreading the meme that market regulation is bad for the market."
I think you're mixing concepts here. Market regulation _is_ generally bad for the market. Antitrust regulation is good for the market.
Big companies really welcome true market regulation, because it prevents smaller players from entering the field. For example, the reasons drug prices are so high is because regulation makes it virtually impossible for small companies to compete. Therefore, the only people willing to lose money for 5-10 years before becoming profitable are those whose only goal is to become absurdly profitable.
The problem w/ payola is that it has a MAJOR adverse affect for people who don't participate. It ruins the free market, turning it into an oligopoly.
To see what the power of payola was, one record company decided to NOT participate when Pink Floyd was on their The Wall tour in Los Angeles, one of the biggest music events of the time. The song (I forgot which) was a hit across the country, but was not played by a single radio station in Los Angeles in the week before the concert.
There's a book about this called "Hit Men" or something like that. It's pretty interesting stuff. A basic overview is at:
http://www.antimusic.com/rants/2003/march.shtml
As far as Spitzer goes, he seems to be doing a great job battling corruption throughout NY. I've been impressed with how much he is accomplishing.
The problem is that real code gets messy. Especially if you have to code a bizzare state machine for handling data from a separate program. Some edge cases may be way too subtle to notice from the code.
There's been many cases where I've needed to document simple code with long explanations, simply because there are so many ways that seem right which are really wrong. Especially when you do something that doesn't seem optimal, because the optimal solution has subtle problems that aren't obvious.
Often times, without enough documentation, future programmers will try to "fix" what appear to be errors or suboptimal designs in your code, which are really there to take care of unusual code-paths.
Looks like PGSQL already fits your bill. For the windows installer, you'd have to contact a company like CommandPrompt.com until PG releases version 8.0. (8.0 beta 3 was recently released).
"Do you think because MyISAM isn't transactional that the whole database isn't?"
Transactionality isn't the only part of data integrity. One of the most glaring errors of MySQL is that inserting an integer value too large into a column gets TRUNCATED instead of getting an error.
I've heard of other problems relating to foreign key handling, but do not remember them.
"The only place I see PgSQL winning the performance war is the query optimizer."
For complicated programs, this is the kicker, too. And the optimizer has only gotten better. You can now do UNIONs and GROUP BYs in views, and they even can get optimized based on the rest of the query.
In addition, write-ahead logging can give dramatic speed improvements for insert/update-heavy databases. Also, PG's MVCC also adds performance to insert/update-heavy databases.
So, you have better performance by the query optimizer for complex queries, and better performance for update/inserts through WAL and MVCC. It looks like MySQL's performance gain is minimal, and only on small applications. I wonder if those applications might be sped up if they just used more advanced queries?
"There's also the universal availability and familiarity when it comes to the mysql protocol and libraries."
I don't see anything special there. In Perl, it's the same no matter what DB you use. In PHP, it's the same no matter what DB you use. The only difference is that the query language under PGSQL is much more comprehensive than MySQL.
The protocol doesn't really matter -- under Windows you can install an adapter for either, in Perl you can install an adapter for either, same w/ PHP.
Maybe they don't like my DocType -- I always use XHTML 1.0 Strict.
Just FYI - the biggest thing I run into on a daily basis is the fact that on Mozilla (and all CSS-compliant browers), width refers to the client-area only, while in IE it also refers to the padding (and margins and borders?).
Therefore, if you need both width and padding, you simply create two divs, one embedded in the other, one with the padding, and one with the width.
Also, I usually have a standard CSS prelude that sets borders and margins to 0 on a lot of elements , and sets the display type of images to "block".
It's running DotNet. [troll]It will probably be down for the rest of the day.[/troll]
"1. How many phones are susceptible to worms and employers?"
Pretty much any Nokia phone.
"4. A cell phone that was constantly transmitting would run up a huge bill, making it either cost-ineffective in the case of employers or easily detectable in the case of a worm."
Not really. Most of these have plans so that in-company calls are free.
If they have cell phones, they already have the issue. In fact, I think there was a slashdot article about doing this easily with most bluetooth cell phones.
This is true with or without VoIP. Bad security is just bad security. Bad management is just bad management.
We're planning on keeping a regular phone or two around just for this sort of thing. They just won't be on every desk.
Asterisk sucks for newbies. Sorry. http://www.voip-info.org/ (site seems to be currently down) has a lot of information, but it's hard to hash out as a newbie. Took me a half a day just to get internal extensions to call each other. Once you "get" it, it's pretty easy.
When I have time, I'm planning on writing a tutorial.
The site mentioned above has a lot of examples listed. Read them, and it will help you understand.
No, you just plug a headset into your sound card. You can even get wireless headsets. Then use firefly or some other soft phone.
"Sure, it sucks to either go without phone or internet, it is worse of BOTH are out."
We are keeping our land lines. VoIP is for our _internal_ phone network. We can use it to make long-distance calls, but we can also set it up to use our land lines _automatically_ if our VoIP provider is down.
We have a pretty small network, so there isn't anything that would bring the _network_ down. If we lost a switch it would take all of 3 seconds to replace it. If our Internet servers and firewall went down, it wouldn't affect the computers which already have received DHCP addresses nor our VoIP box. This could be a problem in bigger companies where their networks have huge spanning trees of switches, but is not a problem in our 30-person office.
We're doing it for cost and flexibility:
1) No telephones == more desk space
2) No telephones == less money wasted on telephone maintenance
3) No telephones == less money wasted on phone line maintenance (only run one network instead of two)
4) IP == If you log in to VPN you can get calls transferred to you at home
5) VoIP == cheap long distance
6) Other features -- automatic call recording, easy ability to script call-ins, etc.
7) PBX Box ---- WAAAAAY cheap ($1,500 for a build-it-yourself asterisk solution vs $10,000+ for a traditional PBX solution)
This seems much more intelligent and noble than what the current nobel peace prize winner seems to think (she thinks that AIDS is a bioterrorism virus developed by mysterious westerners in order to control black people).
"The orphaneges are over-flowing with unwanted children."
The overflow of unwanted children I believe is due to older children, not newborns. I'll try to re-check that, but I'm pretty sure of it.
"As for your 35 million figure, it isn't a baby unless its wanted and born."
What does being _wanted_ have to do with being a baby? Are you not a human if people don't like you?
"I'd love to see all of the conservatives who are against abortion stomach the taxes it would take to financially support the social programs that would be needed to raise these unwanted kids."
Every heard of adoption? Do you know how hard it is for barren parents to adopt a child because of the low number of children available for adoption?
In addition, the point that conservatives always make is not that spending money to help people is bad, but rather that the government is the wrong vehicle to do so, being how bad the government is at ever helping people either effectively or efficiently.
"You are an utter moron if you think that someone who is unopposed to abortion commits a crime is enacting "pro-abortion murder"."
If someone kills a doctor to prevent them from performing an abortion, that is considered a "pro-life murder". So, likewise, if someone kills a woman to prevent her from having a baby, why should that not be considered a "pro-abortion murder"? I'm perfectly willing to do away with both categorizations, giving that in each instance it is marginal freaks and not mainstreamers doing it, but if you set up the category for "pro-life murders" you have to be willing to accept a similar category for "pro-abortion murder".
Of course the pro-abortion movement's history of violence has been completely swept under the rug. Not counting the 35 million babies they've killed, there are large (actually larger) numbers of violent acts committed by pro-abortionists who want someone to have an abortion than by anti-abortionists who are trying to keep someone from having an abortion.
...
This site is very biased, but it at least gives you another perspective to the violence that has occurred, and how the media never reports it.
From the site:
Did you hear anything from the media when pro-abortion activist Eileen Orstein Janezic shot pro-life activist minister and radio talk show host Jerry Simon through his living room window? After killing Simon, she held police at bay with a pistol for six hours while spouting quotes from Anton LaVey's "Satanic Bible." In 1994, a jury found her guilty of murder and sentenced her to life in prison. During her trial, she admitted that she had shot Simon to prove her love of Satan.
Did you hear anything when pro-abortionist Byron Looper, who was running against pro-life state Senator Tommy Burks for a political office, shot him through the left eye with a large-caliber pistol? After he murdered Burks, Looper boasted that "I did it, man, I did it! I killed that dude."
Why didn't you hear about these murders?
The murder of pregnant women by pro-abortion men happens far more often than most people imagine. At least three studies have shown that the most common cause of fatalities among pregnant women is murder, and statistics show that almost one-third of these are due to pro-abortion men who kill their wives or girlfriends simply because they are pregnant.
"2) The "fix" according to the article is not bad at all.. Setting the check in global doesn't amount to 8.7 million hours of lost productivity."
Did you account for the amount of time the administrator spends in Slashdot complaining? I mean, gosh, this has even rendered the open-source comunity lost hours of productivity to complain about Microsoft.
We're only a 14-person office. We have 4 incoming lines, and therefore only need to spend $340 on a 4-port FXO card, plus the machine to run it.