I'll agree to your terms if we switch to proportional representation so that third parties have a fighting chance. Until then, I'll use the best strategy available to me to move the country in a more progressive, civilized, and egalitarian direction: voting Democratic. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's the least terrible option.
You may not be mentally ill, but what if you develop a mental illness? Compare it to heart disease. I have no heart disease, no history of heart disease, and it doesn't run in my family, but I'd be a fool to buy a policy that didn't include it. Without regulation, since heart disease kills millions yearly, the entire industry could decide not to cover it and anybody who had a heart attack would just have to die.
Incorrect. Come on, you know better than that. Insurance only exists because people want it. People also want insurance for heart disease; therefore, a free market will cover heart disease, and while ALL insurance policies wouldn't cover it... like you said, you'd be a fool to get one that doesn't cover it, so yours would cover it.
mandating coverage for mental illness...
... is unconstitutional and violates our essential liberty. If someone wants to not have coverage for it, who the hell are YOU to tell them they MUST have it?
Uninsured mentally ill people are almost always a drain on society.
So are socialists, yet we don't mandate that they take classes in the Federalist Papers or Hayek or WF Buckley.
I'm not misrepresenting you in the slightest. You're an archetypal, callous, right-wing blowhard who sees failure as weakness, and life as being about strife, not cooperation and happiness. Your ideas are definitely, clearly, and verifiable wrong, and the medieval policies you advocate will lead to unfathomable human misery if enacted. You're the kind of man who gives America a bad name in the civilized world.
It's just a news aggregator, with no editorial content.
Editorial bias can be expressed just as much by selecting which articles to present as by actually writing those articles. Even ostensibly unbiased, "mere aggregation" right-wing sites use this effect to create in the mind of the reader a worldview conducive to supporting the right. They over-emphasize terrorism, fear, and silly fluff pieces. They immediately harp on and play up even the most minor of scandals, so long as they deal with left-leaning politicians. These sites de-emphasize economic news, subtle world politics, or reports that make the case for more progressive action.
These sites undoubtedly present a right-wing atmosphere, and do it using only unedited, individually-neutral news stories written by professionals as building blocks. In a way, it's a far more effective form of propaganda than distributing opinion pieces: the easy defense is "we're just reporting the news", and someone relying heavily on one of these sites for news might be more receptive to the propaganda because the articles don't trigger his bullshit sensors the same way an op-ed would.
The right has been smearing Obama constantly since he took office in an effort to delegitimatize and neuter him. It's been an effective policy. They didn't have any dirt on Obama that would stick, so they just made some up.
"Yes", right-wing blowhards might say, "Obama is ruining this country." They then proceed to spout complete lies and distortions, and you idiots nod along approvingly and jeer at the only even half-way decent liberal that's been in power for 30 years. You know, someone who wants to help you, not the corporations.
Sure, I don't agree with all Obama's decisions; in particular, he backed down too quickly on Telecom immunity, supports strong copyrights, and isn't leaving Iraq and Afghanistan soon enough for my tastes. But he's playing fair. But he's not on a mindless quest to just fly the country into the ground and transfer as much wealth into the hands of the rich as possible. That was Bush's policy, and it would have been continued under McCain. Obama could enter a coma tomorrow and still be the best president we've had in eight years.
But you know, he's going beyond not being like Bush. He's actually trying to help, though he's been partially thwarted by determined opposition from the right to any reform anywhere at all that isn't just more wealth transfer to the rich. If you believe Obama is Bush part II, you either have skin in the game, or you need to see a psychiatrist.
I mean, people who are able to dress and feed themselves have been fed such a huge steaming pile of horseshit that they earnestly believe Obama is the anti-christ, and think that health care reform involves ending medicare and lining up senior citizens and killing them. It's ludicrous.
No, Slashdot should have linked to a neutral source of the AP story. But with a troll story like this, that' hardly to be expected.
Furthermore, your attitude reflects a drought to critical thinking, and it's insidious. You're equating legitimate, fact-based advocacy of a policies that will improve the standard of living of middle class in this country (the left), with the propaganda outlets of the right, who lie, cheat, distort, and photoshop fake crowds in order to convince average chumps that it's really in their best interest to transfer all the wealth in the country to a few hundred billionaires.
What's your stake in the game? Why would you advocate a point of view that will hurt you, your family, and all your friends? Nobody here is rich enough to truly benefit from Republican policies, nor will anyone reading this comment ever become that rich in his lifetime. It's time to realize we're all in this together and stop playing the "I've got mine, buddy. Go fuck yourself" political game.
That is precisely what these atheists are guilty of, in fact. They don't want rational argument, so they do stupid things like this.
Why does the right wing appeal to you, pudge? Were you beaten as a child? Do you think lack of success in life is a moral failure? Are you the guy who goes around moderating any post that has a hint of sympathy for the human condition "-1 offtopic", while making sure all the "YOU CAN'T TELL A BUSINESS WHAT TO DO, COMMIES" posts are moderated through the roof? I thought that smelled a little funny, even for the Slashdot crowd.
God, the terrible and declining quality of Slashdot's community makes sense when one of the key people behind the site is himself a right-wing lunatic who beats off to authoritarianism and theocracy.
Our founding fathers had a dream: they set out with the goal that G-D should provide for the people of this great nation, and that the government would not interfere. That's why they won our independence from Ireland in 1812. For a while, our Country got along fine. Now, everyone talks about bad presidents, but I want to talk about a recent one: Obama almost ruined the dream of our Founding Fathers. He tried to remake this nation in his image between the years of our Lord 2008 and 2012, and was the worst president since Roosevelt! I know, I know, but everyone hates on Roosevelt. I wanted to do something different.
Obama, if he'd gotten his way, would have had my hard-earned taxpayer dollars to educate other people's children, improve roads for other people's SUvs, and to defend other people's homes from fire. He was really a fascist, socialist nutjob: what kind of society does that lead to? I mean, when you help out other people, all anyone does it sit around all day waiting for a handout. And after that, what happen is sodomy, and even worse, atheism. I'm glad Sarah Palin put a stop to that when she beat Obama in 2012. I'm glad we don't have elections anyone. Sometimes elections lead to bad people like FDR and Obama being in charge. I can't wait for Sarah's next State of the Union: I hear she'll have five tanks at this one! Those soldiers are soooo cute.
*giggle* but anyway, I mean, at first, Obama's reign wasn't all that bad. He tried to force credit card companies to not give the American people certain offers; he called them "lies", but as Ronald Reagan said, it's really government that's the problem. If he'd been on Mount Rushmore back then, he would have cried. I do have to give credit where credit is due: he stopped those evil commies using the "freedom of information" act to give away our government to China. That law should have been called the "freedom of spying act". I mean, if Sarah hadn't repealed it, China might have found out we'd nuke them in 2019.
The worst part of Obama's reign was when he tried to ruin the best healthcare system in the world by shoving rules and regulations and taxes down our throats. I'm glad that was repealed. Today, we still have the best health care system in the world. If I'm successful, someday I hope to be able to buy into it! I hear they can actually cure tuberculosis! My parents miss too many days at the factory because they keep coughing up blood. I'd love for them to be able to work real, honest 65 hour weeks like God said they should. That way, we could get our own place!
But I digress. This speech is about hope for the future. If we all work hard, we can earn more and more until we get into a lower tax bracket and we're happy. Isn't that what life is about? I know everyone can do it: if at our class reunion, you're poor, it's because you're a bad person, and I know none of my friends are bad people.
- Cynthia LeBaron, Texas, class of 2027 graduation speech
Rootkits are extremely hard to detect unless you know exactly what you are looking for.
Right. Anti-virus products amount to security by blacklast, and that approach doesn't work. Most specifically, that approach violates the principle of least privilege. It's a nightmare.
What all the major operating systems need to do is provide more support for sandboxing --- that is, security by whitelist: allow only a few well-defined safe operations and ban everything else.
It's worked marvelously well on the web. Sure, you have CSRF and cross-site scripting problems, but imagine how much worse the situation would be if every website could by default interact with every other website and your browser, and web browser authors had to continually come up with ad-hoc rules and heuristics to try to catch malicious behavior.
and don't use known-buggy programs like Internet Explorer
why would you be more insecure under Windows than you be doing the same thing under OS X or Linux? Sure, the greater market share of Windows leads to more effort being put into creating malware for it, and that presumably increases the overall risk slightly. But that's a minor point. In general terms, used properly, a Windows system running without an antivirus package is adequately secure.
The problem is that Windows users tend to have terrible security hygiene. They turn security features off, never update, and click the dancing bunnies. That's a separate, social issue. Never try to apply a technical solution to a social problem.
These days, the Windows security model is pretty good; you can attach a security descriptor to practically any kernel object, and the NT kernel has supported ACLs since day one. Slashdot needs to stop living in 1999. We're not talking about Windows 98. You can't crash a machine by pinging it, and it doesn't blue screen every day. Hell, you can even keep it up long than 49.7 days!
Bashing Windows today for the faults of the system a decade just makes you look ridiculous. It's like bashing Linux for not having hardware hot-plugging, or bashing Macs for not having preemptive multitasking. It's ludicrous. You want to bash Microsoft for pervasive DRM? Fine. You want to bash them for outrageous market segmentation? You want to bash them for their traditional embrace-extend-extinguish approach to standards? Fine. Want to bash them for still not having a real package manager in the OS? fine. Those are all still issues. But security and robustness aren't.
Prosecutors aren't obliged to prosecute, and juries aren't obliged to convict. That they ignore this discretion and convict anyway is a reflect of the authoritarian streak in American culture.
Don't link to Fox News. Ever. Murdoch peddles an insidious mix of propaganda and fluff that's intended to neuter our ability to think. The less attention you pay to it, the better.
Silver poisoning doesn't just turn your skin blue: it also causes brain damage.
The story you mention is a cautionary tale about quack medicine in general. "Alternative medicine" that works is just called "medicine". What remains is ineffective, unsafe, or in the case of this poor man, both.
it's the result of cells escaping the limitations of age
Yes, a cell becomes cancerous when it manages to mutate away the multiple redundant control mechanisms that prevent unchecked growth, one of which is the telomere length. (It acts as sort of a biological version of an IP TTL field.) That having been done, a cell can not only escape the normal age limits, but actually become an organism in its own right.
However, you have to take into account that mutations are cumulative, and that as we become older, the probability that any one cell will have all the necessary mutations to become cancerous skyrockets. The effect is that cancer (or let's call it "cumulative chromosomal corruption") has been one of the limiting factors on age.
Yes, it looks increasingly likely that we can keep cancer at bay. But we run into other problems: congestive heart failure and degenerative neural diseases are next on the list of problems to beat. In the long view, we're ultimately limited by the capacity of our brains. In our lifetimes, it'll probably be possible to keep our bodies alive indefinitely. But if we're senile and insensitive, what difference does it make?
The ultimate solution, of course, is the famous transhumanist dream: uploading our minds to different, and presumably more durable, containers. And though I can hope for that, I don't see that technology being available in the lifetime of anyone reading this message. It's more plausible that we'll end our days in reasonable physical shape, but with minds as helpless as those of children.
With wages going down and cost of living going up I do now want someone else deciding the fate of myself, retirement, and family. Its time I became one of them then work for them.
Obviously, you should adjust my proposed figures for changes in the price level. My question stands: what specific, personal actions would you undertake for billions that you would not undertake for mere millions?
The adopters of NoSQL deal with huge volumes of worthless information. They don't care about transactional integrity as much as they care about performance, which is why they chose MySQL over a good relational database in the first place.
If you'd read the linked slides, you would have learned that ACID and the relational data model are orthogonal concepts. You can have neither, either, or both.
How else can you explain the wealth of approaches like ORM mappers, the repository and active record patterns, etc ? They are just patches on the relational model to make them friendly to application code.
ORMs are syntactic sugar for the underlying database operations. It's possible to bypass them when you need SQL's full power and access the same data store.
I for one do not want to use an API with Address1 - Address5 string properties.
So create a table of addresses and use foreign keys to connect them to whatever other table you'd like. Since when does a relational structure require a garbage schema like your example. But surely you know all that.
Further, since most object databases are defined and consumed in the languages you develop against with them, the sophistication is limited to the language
But doesn't that then preclude accessing the same data set from programs written in other languages? The beauty of SQL is that it's language-agnostic.
You also make several points relating to toolchains and testing: sure, some databases have better tools than others. But we're talking about differences between models, not differences between particular tools.
Yes, I omitted the word "in" between "million" and "two". Therefore, I am wrong. The strength of your argument being overwhelming, I am forced to concede.
First of all, if he's asking Slashdot for advice (which is barely a step above reading tea leaves [which itself is a step above asking 4chan]), he doesn't need Facebook-level scalability.
Second, you're confusing scalability and performance. Scalable solutions tend to actually be slower than non-scalable ones: the difference is that a scalable system increases in capacity linearly with the number of machines you throw at it ("horizontal" scalability), whereas a fast non-scalable system generally needs the same number of faster, individual machines to increase capacity ("vertical" scaling).
Third, PostgreSQL has excellent performance, and PostgreSQL does, in fact, scale horizontally.
You're being deliberately obtuse. The question under discussion has to do with incentive to work, not with speculation. My point, to which you still have not responded, is that obscene financial rewards don't cause people to work any harder than high but normal rewards do.
No. To simplify the scenario, let's pretend instead that you receive a lump-sum payment of $2 billion or $1 million two years. What specific actions would take for the former that you would not take for the latter?
As for the "tasks related to founding a company" bit: the intent was to screen out irrelevant answers like "I'd have sex with Newt Gingrich for $2 billion but not for $1 million".
Writing a program in Java makes is scalable in the same way that painting a car red makes it fast. The JVM is quite good these days, but don't make up advantages that don't exist.
Let me ask the question a different way then: which particular tasks related to founding a company would you personally perform in exchange for $2 billion, but not in exchange for $1 million? Would you work longer hours? Talk to your family less?
I cannot conceive of incentive to work increasing appreciably after about $1 million. We can talk about the exact figure, but clearly $2 billion is ludicrous for a private individual.
Excessive compensation is rent seeking and harms society in numerous ways: it distorts the political process through over-concentration of resources; it leads to production of luxury goods that have less utilitarian benefit than mass-marked ones; and worst of all, excessive compensation leads to financial bubbles because it causes too many dollars to chase too few investment opportunities.
Actually, compared to people in industrial nations like ours, hunter-gatherers are happier and have more leisure time. After all, that's the environment to which we're biologically adapted. You can make a serious argument that agriculture is the worst thing to ever befall humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll agree to your terms if we switch to proportional representation so that third parties have a fighting chance. Until then, I'll use the best strategy available to me to move the country in a more progressive, civilized, and egalitarian direction: voting Democratic. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's the least terrible option.
Those are your precise words. So are these:
I'm not misrepresenting you in the slightest. You're an archetypal, callous, right-wing blowhard who sees failure as weakness, and life as being about strife, not cooperation and happiness. Your ideas are definitely, clearly, and verifiable wrong, and the medieval policies you advocate will lead to unfathomable human misery if enacted. You're the kind of man who gives America a bad name in the civilized world.
Editorial bias can be expressed just as much by selecting which articles to present as by actually writing those articles. Even ostensibly unbiased, "mere aggregation" right-wing sites use this effect to create in the mind of the reader a worldview conducive to supporting the right. They over-emphasize terrorism, fear, and silly fluff pieces. They immediately harp on and play up even the most minor of scandals, so long as they deal with left-leaning politicians. These sites de-emphasize economic news, subtle world politics, or reports that make the case for more progressive action.
These sites undoubtedly present a right-wing atmosphere, and do it using only unedited, individually-neutral news stories written by professionals as building blocks. In a way, it's a far more effective form of propaganda than distributing opinion pieces: the easy defense is "we're just reporting the news", and someone relying heavily on one of these sites for news might be more receptive to the propaganda because the articles don't trigger his bullshit sensors the same way an op-ed would.
Let me guess: you're a Glenn Beck fan?
The right has been smearing Obama constantly since he took office in an effort to delegitimatize and neuter him. It's been an effective policy. They didn't have any dirt on Obama that would stick, so they just made some up.
"Yes", right-wing blowhards might say, "Obama is ruining this country." They then proceed to spout complete lies and distortions, and you idiots nod along approvingly and jeer at the only even half-way decent liberal that's been in power for 30 years. You know, someone who wants to help you, not the corporations.
Sure, I don't agree with all Obama's decisions; in particular, he backed down too quickly on Telecom immunity, supports strong copyrights, and isn't leaving Iraq and Afghanistan soon enough for my tastes. But he's playing fair. But he's not on a mindless quest to just fly the country into the ground and transfer as much wealth into the hands of the rich as possible. That was Bush's policy, and it would have been continued under McCain. Obama could enter a coma tomorrow and still be the best president we've had in eight years.
But you know, he's going beyond not being like Bush. He's actually trying to help, though he's been partially thwarted by determined opposition from the right to any reform anywhere at all that isn't just more wealth transfer to the rich. If you believe Obama is Bush part II, you either have skin in the game, or you need to see a psychiatrist.
I mean, people who are able to dress and feed themselves have been fed such a huge steaming pile of horseshit that they earnestly believe Obama is the anti-christ, and think that health care reform involves ending medicare and lining up senior citizens and killing them. It's ludicrous.
No, Slashdot should have linked to a neutral source of the AP story. But with a troll story like this, that' hardly to be expected.
Furthermore, your attitude reflects a drought to critical thinking, and it's insidious. You're equating legitimate, fact-based advocacy of a policies that will improve the standard of living of middle class in this country (the left), with the propaganda outlets of the right, who lie, cheat, distort, and photoshop fake crowds in order to convince average chumps that it's really in their best interest to transfer all the wealth in the country to a few hundred billionaires.
What's your stake in the game? Why would you advocate a point of view that will hurt you, your family, and all your friends? Nobody here is rich enough to truly benefit from Republican policies, nor will anyone reading this comment ever become that rich in his lifetime. It's time to realize we're all in this together and stop playing the "I've got mine, buddy. Go fuck yourself" political game.
Why do you hate atheists, pudge?
Why does the right wing appeal to you, pudge? Were you beaten as a child? Do you think lack of success in life is a moral failure? Are you the guy who goes around moderating any post that has a hint of sympathy for the human condition "-1 offtopic", while making sure all the "YOU CAN'T TELL A BUSINESS WHAT TO DO, COMMIES" posts are moderated through the roof? I thought that smelled a little funny, even for the Slashdot crowd.
God, the terrible and declining quality of Slashdot's community makes sense when one of the key people behind the site is himself a right-wing lunatic who beats off to authoritarianism and theocracy.
Either your salary or your oxycodone prescription must be huge if you think it's not a problem to give legitimacy to right-wing propaganda outlets.
Our founding fathers had a dream: they set out with the goal that G-D should provide for the people of this great nation, and that the government would not interfere. That's why they won our independence from Ireland in 1812. For a while, our Country got along fine. Now, everyone talks about bad presidents, but I want to talk about a recent one: Obama almost ruined the dream of our Founding Fathers. He tried to remake this nation in his image between the years of our Lord 2008 and 2012, and was the worst president since Roosevelt! I know, I know, but everyone hates on Roosevelt. I wanted to do something different.
Obama, if he'd gotten his way, would have had my hard-earned taxpayer dollars to educate other people's children, improve roads for other people's SUvs, and to defend other people's homes from fire. He was really a fascist, socialist nutjob: what kind of society does that lead to? I mean, when you help out other people, all anyone does it sit around all day waiting for a handout. And after that, what happen is sodomy, and even worse, atheism. I'm glad Sarah Palin put a stop to that when she beat Obama in 2012. I'm glad we don't have elections anyone. Sometimes elections lead to bad people like FDR and Obama being in charge. I can't wait for Sarah's next State of the Union: I hear she'll have five tanks at this one! Those soldiers are soooo cute.
*giggle* but anyway, I mean, at first, Obama's reign wasn't all that bad. He tried to force credit card companies to not give the American people certain offers; he called them "lies", but as Ronald Reagan said, it's really government that's the problem. If he'd been on Mount Rushmore back then, he would have cried. I do have to give credit where credit is due: he stopped those evil commies using the "freedom of information" act to give away our government to China. That law should have been called the "freedom of spying act". I mean, if Sarah hadn't repealed it, China might have found out we'd nuke them in 2019.
The worst part of Obama's reign was when he tried to ruin the best healthcare system in the world by shoving rules and regulations and taxes down our throats. I'm glad that was repealed. Today, we still have the best health care system in the world. If I'm successful, someday I hope to be able to buy into it! I hear they can actually cure tuberculosis! My parents miss too many days at the factory because they keep coughing up blood. I'd love for them to be able to work real, honest 65 hour weeks like God said they should. That way, we could get our own place!
But I digress. This speech is about hope for the future. If we all work hard, we can earn more and more until we get into a lower tax bracket and we're happy. Isn't that what life is about? I know everyone can do it: if at our class reunion, you're poor, it's because you're a bad person, and I know none of my friends are bad people.
- Cynthia LeBaron, Texas, class of 2027 graduation speech
Right. Anti-virus products amount to security by blacklast, and that approach doesn't work. Most specifically, that approach violates the principle of least privilege. It's a nightmare.
What all the major operating systems need to do is provide more support for sandboxing --- that is, security by whitelist: allow only a few well-defined safe operations and ban everything else.
It's worked marvelously well on the web. Sure, you have CSRF and cross-site scripting problems, but imagine how much worse the situation would be if every website could by default interact with every other website and your browser, and web browser authors had to continually come up with ad-hoc rules and heuristics to try to catch malicious behavior.
That's right. If you:
why would you be more insecure under Windows than you be doing the same thing under OS X or Linux? Sure, the greater market share of Windows leads to more effort being put into creating malware for it, and that presumably increases the overall risk slightly. But that's a minor point. In general terms, used properly, a Windows system running without an antivirus package is adequately secure.
The problem is that Windows users tend to have terrible security hygiene. They turn security features off, never update, and click the dancing bunnies. That's a separate, social issue. Never try to apply a technical solution to a social problem.
These days, the Windows security model is pretty good; you can attach a security descriptor to practically any kernel object, and the NT kernel has supported ACLs since day one. Slashdot needs to stop living in 1999. We're not talking about Windows 98. You can't crash a machine by pinging it, and it doesn't blue screen every day. Hell, you can even keep it up long than 49.7 days!
Bashing Windows today for the faults of the system a decade just makes you look ridiculous. It's like bashing Linux for not having hardware hot-plugging, or bashing Macs for not having preemptive multitasking. It's ludicrous. You want to bash Microsoft for pervasive DRM? Fine. You want to bash them for outrageous market segmentation? You want to bash them for their traditional embrace-extend-extinguish approach to standards? Fine. Want to bash them for still not having a real package manager in the OS? fine. Those are all still issues. But security and robustness aren't.
Prosecutors aren't obliged to prosecute, and juries aren't obliged to convict. That they ignore this discretion and convict anyway is a reflect of the authoritarian streak in American culture.
And how, exactly, do you propose to do that? Your body's own immune system can't do it, and it's had a 65 million year head start.
Yes, a cell becomes cancerous when it manages to mutate away the multiple redundant control mechanisms that prevent unchecked growth, one of which is the telomere length. (It acts as sort of a biological version of an IP TTL field.) That having been done, a cell can not only escape the normal age limits, but actually become an organism in its own right.
However, you have to take into account that mutations are cumulative, and that as we become older, the probability that any one cell will have all the necessary mutations to become cancerous skyrockets. The effect is that cancer (or let's call it "cumulative chromosomal corruption") has been one of the limiting factors on age.
Yes, it looks increasingly likely that we can keep cancer at bay. But we run into other problems: congestive heart failure and degenerative neural diseases are next on the list of problems to beat. In the long view, we're ultimately limited by the capacity of our brains. In our lifetimes, it'll probably be possible to keep our bodies alive indefinitely. But if we're senile and insensitive, what difference does it make?
The ultimate solution, of course, is the famous transhumanist dream: uploading our minds to different, and presumably more durable, containers. And though I can hope for that, I don't see that technology being available in the lifetime of anyone reading this message. It's more plausible that we'll end our days in reasonable physical shape, but with minds as helpless as those of children.
Obviously, you should adjust my proposed figures for changes in the price level. My question stands: what specific, personal actions would you undertake for billions that you would not undertake for mere millions?
If you'd read the linked slides, you would have learned that ACID and the relational data model are orthogonal concepts. You can have neither, either, or both.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply.
ORMs are syntactic sugar for the underlying database operations. It's possible to bypass them when you need SQL's full power and access the same data store.
So create a table of addresses and use foreign keys to connect them to whatever other table you'd like. Since when does a relational structure require a garbage schema like your example. But surely you know all that.
But doesn't that then preclude accessing the same data set from programs written in other languages? The beauty of SQL is that it's language-agnostic.
You also make several points relating to toolchains and testing: sure, some databases have better tools than others. But we're talking about differences between models, not differences between particular tools.
Yes, I omitted the word "in" between "million" and "two". Therefore, I am wrong. The strength of your argument being overwhelming, I am forced to concede.
First of all, if he's asking Slashdot for advice (which is barely a step above reading tea leaves [which itself is a step above asking 4chan]), he doesn't need Facebook-level scalability.
Second, you're confusing scalability and performance. Scalable solutions tend to actually be slower than non-scalable ones: the difference is that a scalable system increases in capacity linearly with the number of machines you throw at it ("horizontal" scalability), whereas a fast non-scalable system generally needs the same number of faster, individual machines to increase capacity ("vertical" scaling).
Third, PostgreSQL has excellent performance, and PostgreSQL does, in fact, scale horizontally.
You're being deliberately obtuse. The question under discussion has to do with incentive to work, not with speculation. My point, to which you still have not responded, is that obscene financial rewards don't cause people to work any harder than high but normal rewards do.
No. To simplify the scenario, let's pretend instead that you receive a lump-sum payment of $2 billion or $1 million two years. What specific actions would take for the former that you would not take for the latter?
As for the "tasks related to founding a company" bit: the intent was to screen out irrelevant answers like "I'd have sex with Newt Gingrich for $2 billion but not for $1 million".
Bullshit. Languages don't scale: programs do.
Writing a program in Java makes is scalable in the same way that painting a car red makes it fast. The JVM is quite good these days, but don't make up advantages that don't exist.
Let me ask the question a different way then: which particular tasks related to founding a company would you personally perform in exchange for $2 billion, but not in exchange for $1 million? Would you work longer hours? Talk to your family less?
I cannot conceive of incentive to work increasing appreciably after about $1 million. We can talk about the exact figure, but clearly $2 billion is ludicrous for a private individual.
Excessive compensation is rent seeking and harms society in numerous ways: it distorts the political process through over-concentration of resources; it leads to production of luxury goods that have less utilitarian benefit than mass-marked ones; and worst of all, excessive compensation leads to financial bubbles because it causes too many dollars to chase too few investment opportunities.
Actually, compared to people in industrial nations like ours, hunter-gatherers are happier and have more leisure time. After all, that's the environment to which we're biologically adapted. You can make a serious argument that agriculture is the worst thing to ever befall humanity.
Are you seriously arguing that unless the first derivative of one's salary is positive, there's no incentive to work?