It is their choice. Noone cares about "being gay", it's "homosexual acts" that people have problems with. If you are aroused by men, noone really cares. What makes a difference is if you act on it.
All of us are predisposed to certain kinds of wrong behavior, the question is whether or not we act on those predispositions. It doesn't help when society is encouraging people to act on behalf of their whims and impulses rather than on Biblical principal. Of course, that's not surprising since the world seems to be falling further away from God by the day. Such is the price of secular humanism.
What we have found over and over again is that the whiniest, most demanding customers are the ones who got it for the smallest price. We have a product that has a base package + addons. We sell the base package for pretty cheap, and then sell the addons at a pretty high price. We used this model so that we could get more sales of smaller users.
Bad idea.
The small users were the ones who used the MOST tech support time (not even as a percentage basis, but flat. i.e. if you spent $150 on the product, you would likely spend 4-5 hours with tech support, but if you spent $2,000 you would likely need none at all). We wound up discontinuing the $150 version, because it was simply attracting customers that cost too much to service.
I'd generally say to set prices as high as you can legitimately get away with, because you will attract the kind of customers who are knowledgeable enough to use the product effectively and smart enough to know the value of what you're giving them.
Honestly, if something is worth less than $300, I could probably put it together myself with a few lines of perl scripts.
Actually, I think this should be implemented more widely. If we get all of our congressmen labelled as terrorists, perhaps it will prevent them from going to Washington, DC and making idiotic laws.
You should probably reword that sentence to read "corporations are amoral entities at best". Sole Proprietorships and regular partnerships, for example, are not separate from the owner in the same way that corporations are, and therefore are in fact as moral or immoral as their owners.
You are confusing a limited liability corporation w/ a sole proprietorship. A sole proprietorship has unlimited liability. It can reduce liability only in the same ways an individual can -- insurance.
Actually, there is a difference between money capitalism and free market capitalism. Adam Smith was a free market capitalist. Money capitalism is actually pretty much the same as communism but administered in a different fashion.
Unfortunately, in the US, we are moving more and more towards money capitalism.
The problem of communism is that it _forces_ giving. That's the big problem with it. Forcing someone to give what they created to someone else is stealing. The given platitude is actually based on Biblical principles, but even in the most giving times of the Bible, giving was based on free will not coersion.
I don't see how the hacker ethic removes " a day's pay for a day's work". Previously, we were getting a year's pay for a day's work. This will simply shift the workforce so that a smaller percentage will be computer programmers, and the remainder can go into other fields. The computer industry's productivity has been horrible because of the large numbers of coders required to do even simple things on proprietary platforms. This also means that we have a lot of lower-skilled people here - people just for the money who really have no love for computing or any real adeptness.
Just go to an IT department of anything larger than a small corporation and you'll see what I mean. I remember talking to the senior developer at an IT shop for a hospital, and talking about COM interfaces, and she said "didn't Visual Basic remove the need for COM?" Ahhhhh!!! The _senior_ developer!
"We've figured out that since material goods depreciate with time, so does money"
The value of money decreases because of increased leverage and money supply, not because goods are depreciating. If you had a finite money supply, and production kept increasing, your money would not depreciate.
Inflation is not a necessity. It is a result of having to compensate for too much debt (with inflation, it takes less production to pay off debt, with deflation, it takes more).
GAO Audits do not have the authority to audit the following:
(1) transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;
(2) deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, open market operations;
(3) transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or
(4) a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to items.
Actually, although the board of governers is selected by the government, they are not accountable to the government. The Fed is largely a private operation, with very little real oversight. It is a "banker's bank", and is really run by the banking industry, not the government.
"This is the system that has evolved, it works better than the alternatives, and it isn't going to go away."
Actually, the founding fathers of the US thought that central banking was a bad idea, and Madison even said that central banking was more of a cause for the war than taxes.
Thomas Jefferson:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
James Madison:
"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."
Henry Ford:
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Alan Greenspan:
"[The] abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holdings illegal, as was done in the case of gold.... The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.... [This] is the shabby secret of the welfare statist's tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
" I've read that the Fed is a privately owned, for-profit bank that creates "money" by issuing loans to other banks."
This is mostly true. From what I've read, the Fed's shareholders are limitted in the amount of their profit to be 6% of their stock value (stock is fixed at $100/share and cannot change).
If you look at a dollar bill, you'll notice that it says that it is a "Federal Reserve Note". I note is basically a loan that must be paid back at interest. They are issuing IOU's that must be paid back w/ other IOU's, but there isn't ever enough supply to keep up with the system. That's why we have to have ever-increasing inflation in order to not have our economy collapse. Deflation really kills an economy that's run entirely on interest-bearing debt.
An interesting examination is on the money used in the colonies before the revolutionary war. It was called "colonial script". You received this money via interest-free loans that were based on your production. That way there was always enough money to circulate all of the goods on the market, and we didn't sell our souls to banks to pay for it. In fact, James Madison said that it was Britain's abolishment of Colonial Script, and not taxes, that led to the revolutionary war. Using colonial script, America had a great economy without poor houses or other "features" of a debt-ridden society.
"Oh, and the interest charged on the loans must be paid for in "money" that can only be created by issuing more loans."
Yep, this is why we have to have continual inflation. Otherwise we would just be screwed. Because of the way our money system works, we can only get more and more in debt.
Personally, I think a combination of colonial script and gold certificates would be the optimum method for exchange. Gold makes a good currency simply because (a) gold doesn't decay, and (b) it is an asset, not a debt. Other assets would be just as worthwhile (computers, copper, etc.), except that they all decay. A combination like that would allow the money supply to contract and expand w/ production, and also allow non-debt methods of payment as well.
"1)There is little if any difference between women and men, except that generated by cultural differences."
That's completely wrong. We are biochemically and physically very different. If you don't think that affects your personality, you should see how much food affects your behavior, disposition, and outlook. And food is pretty minor compared to the biological differences between men and women.
Honestly, there's a lot of difference between woman A and woman A (yes, I _meant_ to type that). When a woman gives birth to her first child, she changes. This is not a result of society, but rather a result of the biochemical and physical changes that happen in childbirth. Women's bone placement changes, their biochemistry changes, a _lot_ of things change before, during, and after pregnancy. Women are almost literally not the same person. My wife, for example, even has different allergies now than she had before she was pregnant.
Your examples are amusing, and probably true to some degree. But the differences between men and women are real. I would venture to guess that many of the societal differences between men and women came about _because_ of the physical differences as well.
To sum it up - women _are_ very different from men.
"I didn't think postgresql allowed inserts to the view itself though. If it doesn't, then you'll have a much more complex application - since it always needs to know which table to insert to."
You can insert into views, you just have to write rewrite rules to do it, which are pretty simple. It's actually pretty simple, and pretty darn powerful, especially since it doesn't depend on the DBMS knowing how to work with your specific view (i.e. - you can do inserts on views having advanced joins). Less automatic, more control.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/rules. ht ml
As for parallel Oracle, it doesn't really live up to its hype. Even failover clustering on Oracle sucks (I'm speaking from 2 years ago, so it may have improved - however, people were using Oracle for mission-critical applications 2 years ago, so I think my argument still stands).
I agree that for VERY LARGE data sets, PostgreSQL still lacks, but most of the industry isn't working with VERY LARGE sets -- that's basically a niche market.
PITR is actually pretty well-tested, as it is not really any different from the WAL they added many years ago. It's just organized so that it's easier actually do PITR with it. The recovery technology has been there for years, it's the administration that is new.
You can lower the isolation level if you want. That behavior is _required_ for proper full-transaction-isolation handling. If you don't like it, I think there is a "set isolation level" or something that does what you want it to.
Depends on your usage of the term "mission-critical". The only thing that would keep me from using PostgreSQL 8 in a production house when it comes out is data set size, not the value of the data. In fact, I'd be more likely to use PostgreSQL over Oracle if the value of the data was the only factor. I wouldn't use PG7 w/ mission-critical data because of lack of PITR. You can also automate PITR recovery into a failover cluster pretty easily.
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"the old belief that being gay was their choice."
It is their choice. Noone cares about "being gay", it's "homosexual acts" that people have problems with. If you are aroused by men, noone really cares. What makes a difference is if you act on it.
All of us are predisposed to certain kinds of wrong behavior, the question is whether or not we act on those predispositions. It doesn't help when society is encouraging people to act on behalf of their whims and impulses rather than on Biblical principal. Of course, that's not surprising since the world seems to be falling further away from God by the day. Such is the price of secular humanism.
What we have found over and over again is that the whiniest, most demanding customers are the ones who got it for the smallest price. We have a product that has a base package + addons. We sell the base package for pretty cheap, and then sell the addons at a pretty high price. We used this model so that we could get more sales of smaller users.
Bad idea.
The small users were the ones who used the MOST tech support time (not even as a percentage basis, but flat. i.e. if you spent $150 on the product, you would likely spend 4-5 hours with tech support, but if you spent $2,000 you would likely need none at all). We wound up discontinuing the $150 version, because it was simply attracting customers that cost too much to service.
I'd generally say to set prices as high as you can legitimately get away with, because you will attract the kind of customers who are knowledgeable enough to use the product effectively and smart enough to know the value of what you're giving them.
Honestly, if something is worth less than $300, I could probably put it together myself with a few lines of perl scripts.
Actually, I think this should be implemented more widely. If we get all of our congressmen labelled as terrorists, perhaps it will prevent them from going to Washington, DC and making idiotic laws.
What case are you referring to?
Borders? The US has borders? I thought we just let everyone, even potential terrorists through?
"when we believed in a flat earth"
t Ea rth.html
When was that?
http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/Fla
Also, around 190 BC Erostothenes calculated the circumference of the earth, and was correct!
"Companies are amoral entities at best"
You should probably reword that sentence to read "corporations are amoral entities at best". Sole Proprietorships and regular partnerships, for example, are not separate from the owner in the same way that corporations are, and therefore are in fact as moral or immoral as their owners.
Prebuilt, proprietary plugins. Like Flash.
You are confusing a limited liability corporation w/ a sole proprietorship. A sole proprietorship has unlimited liability. It can reduce liability only in the same ways an individual can -- insurance.
Actually, there is a difference between money capitalism and free market capitalism. Adam Smith was a free market capitalist. Money capitalism is actually pretty much the same as communism but administered in a different fashion.
Unfortunately, in the US, we are moving more and more towards money capitalism.
The problem of communism is that it _forces_ giving. That's the big problem with it. Forcing someone to give what they created to someone else is stealing. The given platitude is actually based on Biblical principles, but even in the most giving times of the Bible, giving was based on free will not coersion.
I don't see how the hacker ethic removes " a day's pay for a day's work". Previously, we were getting a year's pay for a day's work. This will simply shift the workforce so that a smaller percentage will be computer programmers, and the remainder can go into other fields. The computer industry's productivity has been horrible because of the large numbers of coders required to do even simple things on proprietary platforms. This also means that we have a lot of lower-skilled people here - people just for the money who really have no love for computing or any real adeptness.
Just go to an IT department of anything larger than a small corporation and you'll see what I mean. I remember talking to the senior developer at an IT shop for a hospital, and talking about COM interfaces, and she said "didn't Visual Basic remove the need for COM?" Ahhhhh!!! The _senior_ developer!
And watch your customer base go to 0.
Also, remember, that if other techs have difficulty supporting your app, your new recruits will have similar problems.
if(business == SOLE_PROPRIETORSHIP) // should print 0
{
a = difference(business, person)
print a;
}
I think the problem is Crayola. My parents only gave me the 8 box set of crayons. My wife's parents gave her the 128 box set of crayons.
"We've figured out that since material goods depreciate with time, so does money"
The value of money decreases because of increased leverage and money supply, not because goods are depreciating. If you had a finite money supply, and production kept increasing, your money would not depreciate.
Inflation is not a necessity. It is a result of having to compensate for too much debt (with inflation, it takes less production to pay off debt, with deflation, it takes more).
GAO Audits do not have the authority to audit the following:
(1) transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;
(2) deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, open market operations;
(3) transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or
(4) a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to items.
Actually, although the board of governers is selected by the government, they are not accountable to the government. The Fed is largely a private operation, with very little real oversight. It is a "banker's bank", and is really run by the banking industry, not the government.
"This is the system that has evolved, it works better than the alternatives, and it isn't going to go away."
Actually, the founding fathers of the US thought that central banking was a bad idea, and Madison even said that central banking was more of a cause for the war than taxes.
Thomas Jefferson:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
James Madison:
"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."
Henry Ford:
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Alan Greenspan:
"[The] abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holdings illegal, as was done in the case of gold.... The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.... [This] is the shabby secret of the welfare statist's tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
" I've read that the Fed is a privately owned, for-profit bank that creates "money" by issuing loans to other banks."
This is mostly true. From what I've read, the Fed's shareholders are limitted in the amount of their profit to be 6% of their stock value (stock is fixed at $100/share and cannot change).
If you look at a dollar bill, you'll notice that it says that it is a "Federal Reserve Note". I note is basically a loan that must be paid back at interest. They are issuing IOU's that must be paid back w/ other IOU's, but there isn't ever enough supply to keep up with the system. That's why we have to have ever-increasing inflation in order to not have our economy collapse. Deflation really kills an economy that's run entirely on interest-bearing debt.
An interesting examination is on the money used in the colonies before the revolutionary war. It was called "colonial script". You received this money via interest-free loans that were based on your production. That way there was always enough money to circulate all of the goods on the market, and we didn't sell our souls to banks to pay for it. In fact, James Madison said that it was Britain's abolishment of Colonial Script, and not taxes, that led to the revolutionary war. Using colonial script, America had a great economy without poor houses or other "features" of a debt-ridden society.
"Oh, and the interest charged on the loans must be paid for in "money" that can only be created by issuing more loans."
Yep, this is why we have to have continual inflation. Otherwise we would just be screwed. Because of the way our money system works, we can only get more and more in debt.
Personally, I think a combination of colonial script and gold certificates would be the optimum method for exchange. Gold makes a good currency simply because (a) gold doesn't decay, and (b) it is an asset, not a debt. Other assets would be just as worthwhile (computers, copper, etc.), except that they all decay. A combination like that would allow the money supply to contract and expand w/ production, and also allow non-debt methods of payment as well.
"1)There is little if any difference between women and men, except that generated by cultural differences."
That's completely wrong. We are biochemically and physically very different. If you don't think that affects your personality, you should see how much food affects your behavior, disposition, and outlook. And food is pretty minor compared to the biological differences between men and women.
Honestly, there's a lot of difference between woman A and woman A (yes, I _meant_ to type that). When a woman gives birth to her first child, she changes. This is not a result of society, but rather a result of the biochemical and physical changes that happen in childbirth. Women's bone placement changes, their biochemistry changes, a _lot_ of things change before, during, and after pregnancy. Women are almost literally not the same person. My wife, for example, even has different allergies now than she had before she was pregnant.
Your examples are amusing, and probably true to some degree. But the differences between men and women are real. I would venture to guess that many of the societal differences between men and women came about _because_ of the physical differences as well.
To sum it up - women _are_ very different from men.
"I didn't think postgresql allowed inserts to the view itself though. If it doesn't, then you'll have a much more complex application - since it always needs to know which table to insert to."
. ht ml
You can insert into views, you just have to write rewrite rules to do it, which are pretty simple. It's actually pretty simple, and pretty darn powerful, especially since it doesn't depend on the DBMS knowing how to work with your specific view (i.e. - you can do inserts on views having advanced joins). Less automatic, more control.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/rules
As for parallel Oracle, it doesn't really live up to its hype. Even failover clustering on Oracle sucks (I'm speaking from 2 years ago, so it may have improved - however, people were using Oracle for mission-critical applications 2 years ago, so I think my argument still stands).
I agree that for VERY LARGE data sets, PostgreSQL still lacks, but most of the industry isn't working with VERY LARGE sets -- that's basically a niche market.
PITR is actually pretty well-tested, as it is not really any different from the WAL they added many years ago. It's just organized so that it's easier actually do PITR with it. The recovery technology has been there for years, it's the administration that is new.
You can lower the isolation level if you want. That behavior is _required_ for proper full-transaction-isolation handling. If you don't like it, I think there is a "set isolation level" or something that does what you want it to.
Depends on your usage of the term "mission-critical". The only thing that would keep me from using PostgreSQL 8 in a production house when it comes out is data set size, not the value of the data. In fact, I'd be more likely to use PostgreSQL over Oracle if the value of the data was the only factor. I wouldn't use PG7 w/ mission-critical data because of lack of PITR. You can also automate PITR recovery into a failover cluster pretty easily.