This is a very good point! Aside from the points you made in your post, here's another one. The source of "inside information" on piracy for BSA is almost always disgruntled current or former employees. I've even seen advertising by the BSA about this, targeting job-seekers to rat out their former employers for bad/inept/dishonest software licensing policies. And I'm personally acquainted with a local newspaper (since closed down) who fired a fairly large group of employees over a management dispute, and were soon afterward audited by BSA and had to cough up thousands in licensing fees and penalties. The company folded, the fired employees stayed fired, and no one won.
It's a bad situation where people are free to use the courts (and the good offices and legal resources) of an industry group to exact revenge, but how is that different from a former employer filing an injunction to stifle competition?
Overall, this is great advice. Don't piss people off. In our litigious society, we all live in glass houses.
It's most likely the case that no lawyer would take the case with only a $12,000 retainer. The unfortunate part of the justice system today (esp. in civil law) is you are entitled to all the justice you can pay for, and no more. In this case the "settlement" cost him $12K. Even if he'd found a lawyer, it would have still cost him $12K. Capitalism has prevailed boys and girls. The ACLU and EFF just can't defend pro bono every case that comes up. (sigh, grumble)
I'm trying to figure out if you didn't read the article, or just didn't understand it. Just which vendor do you think is going to fix the vulnerability in my slapped-together quicksort? Or how about if I put the choices my online customer has made into a hash, and it goes all O(n^2) on me--which maintainer will fix that? This isn't like posting an exploit, it's like saying "the handle of this hammer can only take XX.XX lbs/foot of impact before breaking", and people who build software are safer and better equipped for their job for knowing that. Take your knee-jerk reaction. and filthy mouth, and get a life. Jeeze.
Please, please, after your third post, RTFA! These students (nope, faculty) aren't publishing how to exploit some "security hole"--they're pointing out flaws that are built into existing systems. Letting people know that their built-in RegExp processor can cause huge problems under certain circumstances, and that the data structures (hashes, b-trees, etc.) used in some common programming languages (perl, python, gcc, etc.) can cause grief when they face inputs that are malicious is ALL GOOD!
These aren't problems that can be "fixed" by quickly plugging some overlooked "hole" in the code, Pointing them out does not open up an otherwise closed opportunity for some idiot to fuck with some servers (well, it could, but the problem's been there all along). Instead they're providing a way to help everyone to "know their tools" better, including their weaknesses.
I believe this confusion is a result of the new ENGLISH# language that's still in beta, but is being taught in our schools. %Beautiful and %Practical are being contrasted in the old "English v.101" meaning of the sentence (the language of the original post), but with ENGLISH# they're just identical (syntactically speaking) properties of the object "programming language" and reflect no contrast, and hence the difference in perceived meaning. I'm old school, and believe the grammatical construct of the post in question was contrasting the beauty (most) with the practicality (not the most, and hence by ironic implication, almost NULL) of Scheme.
I shudder to think we could be unable to use English for discourse about the other languages we've invented to speak to computers.
I'm afraid if a user error causes the program to crash, I've got to call it a software error. It's not that hard to write the error handling handling routines, it's just never in the budget. And the users are invariably able to discover new frontiers of errors the programmer(s) never dreamed of. No matter. If clicking the wrong box, entering the wrong data, plugging in the wrong mouse, or installing the wrong screensaver causes a program to crash it's not the users fault (bless them, for they know not), it's the programmers and design engineers fault.
Hardware errors are another problem altogether. Luckily, it's usually quick to diagnose, and it's usually cheaper to replace hardware than software. It's great how I've been using Microsoft error reporting for about 6 months now, and it's never been their fault. They must be getting better. \snicker>
Re:Newbie question about network security
on
Securing Your Network?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That setup is most likely illegal under the new HIPPA regulations that just came into effect in the last couple of weeks. Shut it down. Ask a lawyer. If there are patient records and a website on that server, and the server is compromised, the owner of the server is liable to extremely severe federal penalties, including criminal. If the physician isn't aware of HIPPA (Health Insurance Patient Privacy Act), they need to get with it. Otherwise your GF should resign, because she could get in trouble too. IANAL, but I work in the medical field. Don't risk it. Shut that server down. If they want a website, find a hosting company and upload it there--it's cheap, and you won't have to share the patient-info server with an internet connection. Believe me, this is no joke.
Check the news. I think they are running short, because there aren't nearly as many of them as there were six months ago. The Palestinian suicide bombers are mostly adolescents or young adults acting in ones or twos, on the ground, locally. Even Yassir Arafat condemns them.
It takes a mature team of highly trained and motivated adults to take over a plane and then fly it into some building, and that isn't easy to put together. Those miserable kids in Palestine (and Israel) just don't have the skill, discipline, or training required to pull off a September 11th attack. Of course, they don't get to try again and again until they're good at it--quite often they've been the only victims. It's horrible, and incredibly sad, how they've been manipulated by their teachers, religious leaders, and other adults who should be guiding them. And of course it's horrible about the victims, but I just can't see it as enough motivation to create a police state in the US, or to take away your freedom and privacy (and mine).
Your point about nuclear and bio weapons is well taken. They're scary. But I'm still thinking it's a bit of a canard. If we haven't found them in Iraq, I'm tempted to think the next most likely place to find them will be in the remote hideout of Dr. Doom. I hope I'm right.
Wow, the parent post is one of the best things I've ever read here on Slashdot-- thoughtful, rational, clear-headed, refreshing-- and I thank you for posting it.
People also forget that the US is in fact facing a deadly threat, and that there is no garantee that it will survive this war against terrorism.
Does anyone actually believe this pap? Do you think there are endless teams of suicide hijackers at the beck and call of evil Arabic masterminds, who will keep blowing themselves up on our doorsteps until we finally just collapse and adopt a Muslim state? This is exactly the type of FUD that is being used to promote Patriot II, the "shadow government", Guantanamo, and just about any other acts, laws, and curtailments of rights the administration can come up with. It's comic book thinking. It's like those evil masterminds that Captain America had to fight. Even the comic book super villains didn't send their best and most effective soldiers only on suicide missions.
September 11 was a brilliantly executed attack carried out by a team of incredibly disciplined and effective goons with a death wish (maybe not all of them, but the leaders knew they would die). The attack was on a target of some symbolic importance, though not of any strategic value. The loss of life was atrocious, but that's all that happened. Please let's not let out elected officials forget it. I don't hold my representatives responsible. I don't think they need to dismantle our freedoms in order to protect me against what will likely not happen again in our generation. And to honor the victims, I suggest everyone hold out a hand of peace and generosity to someone.
If someone wanted to bring down democracy and America (which I love and want very much to survive), the best way to effect that would be to convince it to dismantle itself. Our present administration may just be feckless enough and paternalistic enough to attempt that. I'm trying to imagine the difference between an oppressive, fascistic police state run by a fundamentalist Muslim and an oppressive, fascistic police state run by a fundamentalist Christian. I guess in the latter case I would be more likely to be able to pronounce the names of the bad guys.
Re:offtopic
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Let's just call it what it is... a good ol' Texas-sized lynching. I don't believe a lot of strategic, global thinking went into it-- there was a bad guy, and a bunch of people with weapons willing to follow their leader and dispense the justice the rest of the world was too slow to mete out. It appears to have been a successful lynching, too. That's why no one is too concerned that the WMD's haven't turned up.
How did a link go Goats.cx get modded informative? Should I infer that moderators don't follow links and just read buzzwords? A very successful troll, but gross, gross, disgusting. Don't click the link.
So this Chinese "Mata Hari" was a Clinton appointee? Or wait, it seems like she might have had some high-ranking position in the Gore administration? Oh wait, Gore didn't have an administration. Wait, I get it, there's some sort of connection between the FBI agent and the Buddhist Republican fundraisers that the Bubba administration held. Wait, they weren't Republicans. Darn! I just don't get it. Maybe there isn't anything here. Maybe there's just some rote regurgitation of fictitious character creation so we can topple them (straw dog, I think it's called), as well as some slightly racist casting of aspersions on the former administration, and an arrested FBI agent (who was arrested for what?). Hmmmmmm. Does the FBI agent constitute a "high ranking" Clinton Administration official? Is sleeping with Mata Hari a felony? Does this sound like some closely argued Rush Limbaugh argument? WTF? I am dirty. I responded to an AC.
I was referring to AOL IM the functionality, not the stand-alone product. I guess I should have just spelled it out without the capital letters. AOL had instant messaging for as long as I used it, and it was one of the (only) features I liked. Since then (I think I used AOL way back in 1993 or so), I've used IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, all with their own great features and annoyances.
Now, about the only people on my buddy lists are my children. It's still a great idea. ICQ is a compelling and immediate enough means of communication (you can actually watch the other person type) to substitute (much more cheaply) for the telephone, and it's still easy enough to just switch off when I don't want to be distracted.
I have a very high/. number, but my ICQ ID is under 200K. I think that means I was an early adopter. And the reason I got it (and kept it) was because it was a substitute for AOL IM. I hardly ever load it now, and only when I want to talk to someone already on my list. Times change, and reasons and motivation to communicate change. It's interesting that "they" (whoever they are) have figured out how to spam on ICQ. It never fails if I forget to turn off ICQ at night, there are a half-dozen messages from pr0n pureyors in the morning.
AMEN. If some lawmakers believe this, they will try to pass a law, guaranteed. It's what they do. It's all they do. If they didn't propose legislation about anything they perceived could rile up their constituents^h^h^hemployers, they'd be useless to society. Oh wait...
Re:Apache is Dying! Let's look at this months numb
on
Introduction to PHP5
·
· Score: 1
A minor quibble with an otherwise wise post:
>> A drop in share in one month doesn't conclude to the OS dying
Apache is an application, not an OS. Apache runs on quite a few OS's, and runs on Win32, as a matter of fact.
Amen. You're right. I was so bored I was browsing articles about Apple and game consoles. This gives us the option of reading all the witty "this is a dupe" comments as well. No news on a weekend when I've got mod points and the house to myself just ain't right!
It appears that not all stories get into the subscribers' "see the future" queue. Also, as far as I can tell, subscribers don't get to post early. There's no comment link, and hence no feedback loop, in the "future" stories. All the future stories seem to do for subscribers is let them read the referenced articles before they get all/.'ed. Heck, I'd volunteer to do a quick spell (and grammar) check on them ahead of time, but there's no way to do that.
I do find it a little strange the editors don't read the articles enough to avoid the dupes.
Views make it possible to sort out complicated data relationships ONCE (preferably by the most experienced programmer in the house) and then access the results over and over. As long as the view stays valid, any query against the view can be assumed to be valid. The shop where I work (Oracle 8.1.7, I think) has very complicated OLTP data structures--great for keeping everything sorted out during transaction processing, but abysmal for reporting. We have some views that use 20 or more tables with complicated sub-selects, computations, unions, and validations. If we had to rely on the coders to get that stuff right for every report or query request that came into the department nothing would get done. With a view, the report writers just query the views for their data. It's not always blisteringly fast, but at least we don't need Einstein to code every simple data or report request that comes down the pike.
Your point about views-on-views-on-views bogging things down is well taken. Using just a few well designed views and enforcing their use will at least allow the DBA/Data Architect/Programmer to find the right target for optimizing.
As far as their necessity in MySQL, views are a huge help for inexperienced people to get complex data into simple and usable form. If the data structures are simple to begin with, and if there's no access to the data outside of the application it's created and stored in, or if the programmer has already supplied all the outputs that are required for the application, then views are superfluous. Otherwise they can be a real time-saver and save a lot of programmer time/aggravation/skill.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a trick in that SQL query (doesn't appear to be), but version 4 definitely does sub-selects. They make phpMyAdmin (the version I use, at least) stop functioning correctly, but they definitely work.
(Damn, I just went to confirm it, but I'm running version 3.27 and it doesn't like sub-selects). Anyway, you're just going to have to believe me. I tried it. It works. Version 4.x.xx will do sub-selects.
I guess it's out of the toy-box! Now, if only I could create a view, or a function (though the article hinted that UDF creation was in the "MAX" version, but not quite ready for prime time), then MySQL would be all growed up.
Factoring out controlling factors: 6'2" in fact. Missed the plant tour. Not a statistician. Have a full head of hair. Possibly undereducated. Stand by my previous post. American corporations are run at the highest levels by a bunch of effete, rich asshats with no regard for the issues of their employees, or what having a job with their corporation means. They're interested in protecting their interests, and they've got a vicious and myopic financial (which they define as "moral") magnifying glass. They, like me, will all die and make not so much as a rats gasp of a difference in the universe. Unlike me, they have no moderator points, which I'll not waste here. I hope your employers keep you on.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Don't piss people off.
This is a very good point! Aside from the points you made in your post, here's another one. The source of "inside information" on piracy for BSA is almost always disgruntled current or former employees. I've even seen advertising by the BSA about this, targeting job-seekers to rat out their former employers for bad/inept/dishonest software licensing policies. And I'm personally acquainted with a local newspaper (since closed down) who fired a fairly large group of employees over a management dispute, and were soon afterward audited by BSA and had to cough up thousands in licensing fees and penalties. The company folded, the fired employees stayed fired, and no one won.
It's a bad situation where people are free to use the courts (and the good offices and legal resources) of an industry group to exact revenge, but how is that different from a former employer filing an injunction to stifle competition?
Overall, this is great advice. Don't piss people off. In our litigious society, we all live in glass houses.
It's most likely the case that no lawyer would take the case with only a $12,000 retainer. The unfortunate part of the justice system today (esp. in civil law) is you are entitled to all the justice you can pay for, and no more. In this case the "settlement" cost him $12K. Even if he'd found a lawyer, it would have still cost him $12K. Capitalism has prevailed boys and girls. The ACLU and EFF just can't defend pro bono every case that comes up. (sigh, grumble)
I'm trying to figure out if you didn't read the article, or just didn't understand it. Just which vendor do you think is going to fix the vulnerability in my slapped-together quicksort? Or how about if I put the choices my online customer has made into a hash, and it goes all O(n^2) on me--which maintainer will fix that? This isn't like posting an exploit, it's like saying "the handle of this hammer can only take XX.XX lbs/foot of impact before breaking", and people who build software are safer and better equipped for their job for knowing that. Take your knee-jerk reaction. and filthy mouth, and get a life. Jeeze.
Please, please, after your third post, RTFA! These students (nope, faculty) aren't publishing how to exploit some "security hole"--they're pointing out flaws that are built into existing systems. Letting people know that their built-in RegExp processor can cause huge problems under certain circumstances, and that the data structures (hashes, b-trees, etc.) used in some common programming languages (perl, python, gcc, etc.) can cause grief when they face inputs that are malicious is ALL GOOD!
These aren't problems that can be "fixed" by quickly plugging some overlooked "hole" in the code, Pointing them out does not open up an otherwise closed opportunity for some idiot to fuck with some servers (well, it could, but the problem's been there all along). Instead they're providing a way to help everyone to "know their tools" better, including their weaknesses.
Read. Learn. Think. Post.
>>with the "1-Click" feature I could easily spend $100 without even noticing
Doesn't Jeff Bezos own the patent on that? And doesn't that mean you're paying Amazon for that feature, maybe "without even noticing"?
Just wondering...
I believe this confusion is a result of the new ENGLISH# language that's still in beta, but is being taught in our schools. %Beautiful and %Practical are being contrasted in the old "English v.101" meaning of the sentence (the language of the original post), but with ENGLISH# they're just identical (syntactically speaking) properties of the object "programming language" and reflect no contrast, and hence the difference in perceived meaning. I'm old school, and believe the grammatical construct of the post in question was contrasting the beauty (most) with the practicality (not the most, and hence by ironic implication, almost NULL) of Scheme.
I shudder to think we could be unable to use English for discourse about the other languages we've invented to speak to computers.
I'm afraid if a user error causes the program to crash, I've got to call it a software error. It's not that hard to write the error handling handling routines, it's just never in the budget. And the users are invariably able to discover new frontiers of errors the programmer(s) never dreamed of. No matter. If clicking the wrong box, entering the wrong data, plugging in the wrong mouse, or installing the wrong screensaver causes a program to crash it's not the users fault (bless them, for they know not), it's the programmers and design engineers fault.
Hardware errors are another problem altogether. Luckily, it's usually quick to diagnose, and it's usually cheaper to replace hardware than software. It's great how I've been using Microsoft error reporting for about 6 months now, and it's never been their fault. They must be getting better. \snicker>
That setup is most likely illegal under the new HIPPA regulations that just came into effect in the last couple of weeks. Shut it down. Ask a lawyer. If there are patient records and a website on that server, and the server is compromised, the owner of the server is liable to extremely severe federal penalties, including criminal. If the physician isn't aware of HIPPA (Health Insurance Patient Privacy Act), they need to get with it. Otherwise your GF should resign, because she could get in trouble too. IANAL, but I work in the medical field. Don't risk it. Shut that server down. If they want a website, find a hosting company and upload it there--it's cheap, and you won't have to share the patient-info server with an internet connection. Believe me, this is no joke.
Check the news. I think they are running short, because there aren't nearly as many of them as there were six months ago. The Palestinian suicide bombers are mostly adolescents or young adults acting in ones or twos, on the ground, locally. Even Yassir Arafat condemns them.
It takes a mature team of highly trained and motivated adults to take over a plane and then fly it into some building, and that isn't easy to put together. Those miserable kids in Palestine (and Israel) just don't have the skill, discipline, or training required to pull off a September 11th attack. Of course, they don't get to try again and again until they're good at it--quite often they've been the only victims. It's horrible, and incredibly sad, how they've been manipulated by their teachers, religious leaders, and other adults who should be guiding them. And of course it's horrible about the victims, but I just can't see it as enough motivation to create a police state in the US, or to take away your freedom and privacy (and mine).
Your point about nuclear and bio weapons is well taken. They're scary. But I'm still thinking it's a bit of a canard. If we haven't found them in Iraq, I'm tempted to think the next most likely place to find them will be in the remote hideout of Dr. Doom. I hope I'm right.
Wow, the parent post is one of the best things I've ever read here on Slashdot-- thoughtful, rational, clear-headed, refreshing-- and I thank you for posting it.
People also forget that the US is in fact facing a deadly threat, and that there is no garantee that it will survive this war against terrorism.
Does anyone actually believe this pap? Do you think there are endless teams of suicide hijackers at the beck and call of evil Arabic masterminds, who will keep blowing themselves up on our doorsteps until we finally just collapse and adopt a Muslim state? This is exactly the type of FUD that is being used to promote Patriot II, the "shadow government", Guantanamo, and just about any other acts, laws, and curtailments of rights the administration can come up with. It's comic book thinking. It's like those evil masterminds that Captain America had to fight. Even the comic book super villains didn't send their best and most effective soldiers only on suicide missions.
September 11 was a brilliantly executed attack carried out by a team of incredibly disciplined and effective goons with a death wish (maybe not all of them, but the leaders knew they would die). The attack was on a target of some symbolic importance, though not of any strategic value. The loss of life was atrocious, but that's all that happened. Please let's not let out elected officials forget it. I don't hold my representatives responsible. I don't think they need to dismantle our freedoms in order to protect me against what will likely not happen again in our generation. And to honor the victims, I suggest everyone hold out a hand of peace and generosity to someone.
If someone wanted to bring down democracy and America (which I love and want very much to survive), the best way to effect that would be to convince it to dismantle itself. Our present administration may just be feckless enough and paternalistic enough to attempt that. I'm trying to imagine the difference between an oppressive, fascistic police state run by a fundamentalist Muslim and an oppressive, fascistic police state run by a fundamentalist Christian. I guess in the latter case I would be more likely to be able to pronounce the names of the bad guys.
Let's just call it what it is... a good ol' Texas-sized lynching. I don't believe a lot of strategic, global thinking went into it-- there was a bad guy, and a bunch of people with weapons willing to follow their leader and dispense the justice the rest of the world was too slow to mete out. It appears to have been a successful lynching, too. That's why no one is too concerned that the WMD's haven't turned up.
How did a link go Goats.cx get modded informative? Should I infer that moderators don't follow links and just read buzzwords? A very successful troll, but gross, gross, disgusting. Don't click the link.
So this Chinese "Mata Hari" was a Clinton appointee? Or wait, it seems like she might have had some high-ranking position in the Gore administration? Oh wait, Gore didn't have an administration. Wait, I get it, there's some sort of connection between the FBI agent and the Buddhist Republican fundraisers that the Bubba administration held. Wait, they weren't Republicans. Darn! I just don't get it. Maybe there isn't anything here. Maybe there's just some rote regurgitation of fictitious character creation so we can topple them (straw dog, I think it's called), as well as some slightly racist casting of aspersions on the former administration, and an arrested FBI agent (who was arrested for what?). Hmmmmmm. Does the FBI agent constitute a "high ranking" Clinton Administration official? Is sleeping with Mata Hari a felony? Does this sound like some closely argued Rush Limbaugh argument? WTF? I am dirty. I responded to an AC.
I was referring to AOL IM the functionality, not the stand-alone product. I guess I should have just spelled it out without the capital letters. AOL had instant messaging for as long as I used it, and it was one of the (only) features I liked. Since then (I think I used AOL way back in 1993 or so), I've used IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, all with their own great features and annoyances.
Now, about the only people on my buddy lists are my children. It's still a great idea. ICQ is a compelling and immediate enough means of communication (you can actually watch the other person type) to substitute (much more cheaply) for the telephone, and it's still easy enough to just switch off when I don't want to be distracted.
I have a very high /. number, but my ICQ ID is under 200K. I think that means I was an early adopter. And the reason I got it (and kept it) was because it was a substitute for AOL IM. I hardly ever load it now, and only when I want to talk to someone already on my list. Times change, and reasons and motivation to communicate change. It's interesting that "they" (whoever they are) have figured out how to spam on ICQ. It never fails if I forget to turn off ICQ at night, there are a half-dozen messages from pr0n pureyors in the morning.
That was awesome. Thanks for all the typing. If I wasn't already a member of the choir, I would be after reading that.
AMEN. If some lawmakers believe this, they will try to pass a law, guaranteed. It's what they do. It's all they do. If they didn't propose legislation about anything they perceived could rile up their constituents^h^h^hemployers, they'd be useless to society. Oh wait...
A minor quibble with an otherwise wise post:
>> A drop in share in one month doesn't conclude to the OS dying
Apache is an application, not an OS. Apache runs on quite a few OS's, and runs on Win32, as a matter of fact.
>> Ignore it at youre perl.
.NET perl implementation?
This is a joke, right? or is this a reference to the
Amen. You're right. I was so bored I was browsing articles about Apple and game consoles. This gives us the option of reading all the witty "this is a dupe" comments as well. No news on a weekend when I've got mod points and the house to myself just ain't right!
It appears that not all stories get into the subscribers' "see the future" queue. Also, as far as I can tell, subscribers don't get to post early. There's no comment link, and hence no feedback loop, in the "future" stories. All the future stories seem to do for subscribers is let them read the referenced articles before they get all /.'ed. Heck, I'd volunteer to do a quick spell (and grammar) check on them ahead of time, but there's no way to do that.
I do find it a little strange the editors don't read the articles enough to avoid the dupes.
Views make it possible to sort out complicated data relationships ONCE (preferably by the most experienced programmer in the house) and then access the results over and over. As long as the view stays valid, any query against the view can be assumed to be valid. The shop where I work (Oracle 8.1.7, I think) has very complicated OLTP data structures--great for keeping everything sorted out during transaction processing, but abysmal for reporting. We have some views that use 20 or more tables with complicated sub-selects, computations, unions, and validations. If we had to rely on the coders to get that stuff right for every report or query request that came into the department nothing would get done. With a view, the report writers just query the views for their data. It's not always blisteringly fast, but at least we don't need Einstein to code every simple data or report request that comes down the pike.
Your point about views-on-views-on-views bogging things down is well taken. Using just a few well designed views and enforcing their use will at least allow the DBA/Data Architect/Programmer to find the right target for optimizing.
As far as their necessity in MySQL, views are a huge help for inexperienced people to get complex data into simple and usable form. If the data structures are simple to begin with, and if there's no access to the data outside of the application it's created and stored in, or if the programmer has already supplied all the outputs that are required for the application, then views are superfluous. Otherwise they can be a real time-saver and save a lot of programmer time/aggravation/skill.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a trick in that SQL query (doesn't appear to be), but version 4 definitely does sub-selects. They make phpMyAdmin (the version I use, at least) stop functioning correctly, but they definitely work.
(Damn, I just went to confirm it, but I'm running version 3.27 and it doesn't like sub-selects). Anyway, you're just going to have to believe me. I tried it. It works. Version 4.x.xx will do sub-selects.
I guess it's out of the toy-box! Now, if only I could create a view, or a function (though the article hinted that UDF creation was in the "MAX" version, but not quite ready for prime time), then MySQL would be all growed up.
Factoring out controlling factors: 6'2" in fact. Missed the plant tour. Not a statistician. Have a full head of hair. Possibly undereducated. Stand by my previous post. American corporations are run at the highest levels by a bunch of effete, rich asshats with no regard for the issues of their employees, or what having a job with their corporation means. They're interested in protecting their interests, and they've got a vicious and myopic financial (which they define as "moral") magnifying glass. They, like me, will all die and make not so much as a rats gasp of a difference in the universe. Unlike me, they have no moderator points, which I'll not waste here. I hope your employers keep you on.