It has been quite obvious that the designers of SQL had little understanding of data fundamentals in general, and the relational model in particular.
Date has been hammering on this point for nearly 20 years:
A word of warning: DB2 and systems like it are "state-of-the-art" products, which is why we discuss them here. However, that staement should not be taken to mean that those systems are ideal in any absolute sense. In particular, they
do not support all aspects of the underlying theory (i.e. the relational model -- see Part 3 of this book). In certain respects, most present-day systems are regrettably ad-hoc [pg 96].
In the late 1980s, Date semed more taken by INGRES which used QUEL as its query language:
QUEL may be regarded as a fairly "pure" implentation of the relational calculus; as such, it is a considerably less idiosyncratic language than SQL, and indeed is clearly superior to SQL in some ways [pg 209].
Date worked for IBM until 1983 where he worked on SQL/DS and DB2. He has written a large number of well respected papers on data base theory. Even if you don't agree with what he writes, he is definitely worth reading.
Date, C.J., An Introduction to Database Systems, Fourth Edition, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1988.
Are you too young to remember Pierre Trudeau using the War Measures Act to suspend civil liberties when Quebec terrorists kidnapped a British diplomat? Canada fought its own nasty little war with Quebec separatists in the 1960s and 70s and used many of the same tactics that we are currently using in the States. I remember an uncle of mine from New Brunswick lamenting the fact that the RCMP did not have the same kinds of files and data on Quebec radicals that the FBI had on US anti-war radicals.
Is High Times and other pro-marijuana literature still banned in Canada? Or has that sort of anti-free speech law that Canada used to be infamous for finally died out? Its been a while since I've been North to visit the relatives.
Sorry, I know that both Canada and the world have romantic notions about what an ideal place Canada is (kinda like Norway) and I don't really mean to piss in your Wheaties, but you need to read your own history. Canada has had many of the same fights over civil liberties vs security that the US has had. And civil liberties have lost many rounds in Canada.
The Gnome group seems to think they're smarter than me, and that if their system doesn't work with me, then I should look elsewhere, and so I have.
Agreed. Apple seems to have had this same attitude, too, at least in its early days. I said "in its early days," because when I see that attitude, I usually ignore the company from then on and have no idea if they have changed or not. There are always alternatives which have learned to listen to their customers.
The fact that they have had to go such great lengths to defend the utility of such a simple "innovation" really ought to tell the innovators something. Or would if they were capable of listening.
That's a nice explanation and truly appreciated. But I want to know what significance, if any, this has for any other discipline. I mean if the Riemann Hypothesis is true, does this imply that the Earth is flat, that spaceships can be built to fly at warp 6, or that George Bush will win reelection? Or is it all just a wonderfully fun problem which would be OK, too?
It is not necessarily the HD, but more likely some combo of PCI bus bandwidth limitations and memory size. The burner needs a steady stream of supplied data or it will just create a coaster. The faster the burn rate and the more data to burn, the more likely that something will stall the process. But if 52x write speeds work with CDs, I'd expect 52x to work with DVDs eventually as long as the computer isn't doing anything else and has enough memory to provide a sufficient buffer.
And which glibc are they using? IIRC glibc 2.3.2 is not compatible with gcc 3.4 and glibc 2.3.3 has not yet been released. Last month I tried to build an LFS w/ gcc 3.4 and a cvs version of glibc 2.3.3 w/ several patches available from glibc bugzilla. Everything built, but many of the glibc and binutils tests failed. There were also trivial incompatibilities building several of the base programs with gcc 3.4. Does Mandrake have a standard place for obtaining their patches against the base gnu code?
GE/GM crops are just allowing us to add factors that would normally take millenia to add.
And in a decade or so could possibly wreck the kind of ecological destruction that would normally take millenia as well. Sticking genes from one species into another is not at all the same thing as selectively breeding a single species for desirable traits.
Why do I need Vonage to use VoIP? At present, the only reason is that Vonage can route my calls from the net to the PSTN and verse visa. But as more people start using VoIP and fewer use the PSTN, then the need for Vonage will gradually vanish. All VoIP will need is a directory mechanism for user lookups. After that, VoIP is no different than http, ftp, smtp, etc. Its just another protocol and anyone can run it without needing anything more than access to the net. Vonage is like a parasite that can't afford to kill its host because then it would kill itself.
Never substitute anecdotes for actual measurements. Weighted average fuel efficiency in Europe is ~= 30 MPG. In the US it is 20.1 MPG. European fuel efficiency has been declining, but it is still 50% better than the US. Further, in the 1970s after the first gas crisis, there was a very measurable jump in average fuel efficiency in the US.
Full disclosure: I used to teach environmental economics and covered this material in some depth.
Documentary: A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.
I don't see anything in that definition that says one has to cover all sides of an issue to make a documentary. I also don't recall Moore ever describing himself as a journalist.
From the NYT:
"I did not set out to make a political film," Mr. Moore said at a news conference after the ceremony. "I want people to leave thinking that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics."
As it should be. The very best documentaries are at least as much art as they are a recitation of facts. I mean I can only watch the History Channel or Bob Woodward for so long before getting bored with whatever they are documenting this afternoon.
Science is fun, but it can also be very dangerous... Be safe
My father once caught me making gunpowder using a chem lab kit he'd bought me and an old mortar I'd found in the garage. His first reaction was "Idiot kid!" Then it was "Oh, wait, that's what I used that mortar for when I was a kid. Let me show you how to do it safely." Basically wet the ingredients down so it doesn't accidentally catch fire while you are grinding it. I suspect he'd learned that one the hard way. I'm big on the safety angle with my kids now, too. In my case its a result of an experiment with some gasoline and an Estes rocket engine when I was a teenager.
I got so addicted to the taste of fresh roasted coffe, I started roasting it at home in a cast iron skillet. Gave it up after a few months because it was too much work and made the house smell of roasting coffee (which doesn't smell nearly as nice as brewing coffee.)
Try using a hot air popcorn popper. Works great. I've also used a hand-cranked basket affair over a gas stove, but that is too much work.
My gp comment was directed soley at the jury nullification issue and was not intended to address the ggp's views on challanges. But since you asked;), as long as both sides have equal rights to challange potential jurors, I don't see what the problem is here. Of course IANAL and likely neither are you so I doubt either of us really has much understanding of the legal theory behind jury challanges or how they work in practice.
Second, there is the question of jury nullification. Judges and prosecutors seldom inform juries of their right and responsibility to return a "not guilty" verdict if they feel that the law does not reflect the values of the community or has not been applied appropriately.
Is this what Southern juries did in the 1960s when they aquitted KKK members of murder charges involving lynchings of African-Americans? Jury nullification sounds good as a check on tyranny until you realize that it is just as likely to be used as an instrument of tyranny by a majority bent on depriving a minority of their rights.
and perhaps most significantly, you seem unaware that the activities of the FBI are overseen by Senators and Representatives that you and I vote for
Oh sure, I trust the other branches of the Gov't to oversee the FBI.
The problem is that Congressional and Court oversight usually waits until things have gotten so far out of control that they can't duck their responsibility. By which time many innocent people have been hurt. I call the current stupidity in Iraq (ICRC pdf - sorry) as my first witness and Frank Church as my second.
Your significantly more paranoid friend (who has worked for two out of three branches of the Federal Gov't).
No. You're wrong. A jump in the gas tax would convince many people to stop driving gas guzzling SUVs and start driving subcompacts. Few people need to drive an SUV to work. In fact, one of the reasons that the Japanese did such a thorough number on the American auto industry in the 1970s was that when the first gas crisis hit, the Japanese had subcompacts for sale while the Americans continued to produce gas guzzling boats. Price matters.
The notion that this would automatically effect diesel prices for truck and rail transport is also nonsence. It would be trivial to structure the tax so that it applied to retail gasoline only.
Further, the idea that you should build the public transport systems first before implementing a gas tax is just reinforcing previous years of bad policy decisions. It smacks of a "If you build it, they will use it" attitude. We have lots of unused public transport in most major US cities. Some places like NYC and Wash, DC have great public systems that are well used. But that is usually because the alternative invloves high commuting time and bridge and parking tolls -- i.e private transport has a high cost, exactly what a gas tax would achieve. Lets convince people to use what is already available and use gas tax revenues to expand those systems after we can show that people are using them.
Today's problem won't run on today's hardware, only on tomorrows'. I can only solve yesterday's problem on today's hardware. By waiting until tomorrow, I'll have the hardware to solve today's problem, but that problem won't be interesting tomorrow, it is only interesting today. Waiting only allows one to solve uninteresting problems. Q.E.D.
Except in this case it probably was accidental. Caeser got into a major fight in Alexandria and the docks where much of the library material was stored caught fire. Here is one scholars attempt to uncover who was guilty of destroying the library.
Although you are right that many conquerers did deliberately destroy the writings of the conquered (e.g. the Spanish in Mesoamerica), I suspect that more often such libraries were destroyed because the conquerers didn't know or care what a library was (e.g. the Mongol destruction of Baghdad's library or, more recently, Rumsfeld's neglect in Baghdad -- I wonder what librarian Laura Bush thought about the untidiness of U.S. forces standing by while an ancient library burned?).
The current problem of interest is always too large to run on the current generation of hardware. Better bang/$ simply means that a more difficult problem will suddenly become enticing. It isn't only numerical computing that suffers from this effect. Look at the way accelerator physicists always seem to need a bigger machine, astronomers a more powerful telescope, or biologists faster DNA sequencers. If the problem set were always static, then slacktitude might be meaningful. But the problem set is always expanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Date has been hammering on this point for nearly 20 years:
In the late 1980s, Date semed more taken by INGRES which used QUEL as its query language:
Date worked for IBM until 1983 where he worked on SQL/DS and DB2. He has written a large number of well respected papers on data base theory. Even if you don't agree with what he writes, he is definitely worth reading.
Date, C.J., An Introduction to Database Systems, Fourth Edition, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1988.
Are you too young to remember Pierre Trudeau using the War Measures Act to suspend civil liberties when Quebec terrorists kidnapped a British diplomat? Canada fought its own nasty little war with Quebec separatists in the 1960s and 70s and used many of the same tactics that we are currently using in the States. I remember an uncle of mine from New Brunswick lamenting the fact that the RCMP did not have the same kinds of files and data on Quebec radicals that the FBI had on US anti-war radicals.
Go look up the Act to Combat Terrorism (Bill C-36) and its companions.
Is High Times and other pro-marijuana literature still banned in Canada? Or has that sort of anti-free speech law that Canada used to be infamous for finally died out? Its been a while since I've been North to visit the relatives.
Sorry, I know that both Canada and the world have romantic notions about what an ideal place Canada is (kinda like Norway) and I don't really mean to piss in your Wheaties, but you need to read your own history. Canada has had many of the same fights over civil liberties vs security that the US has had. And civil liberties have lost many rounds in Canada.
is 42 in DNA code.
Hobbling "off the shelf" solutions together wins my vote as best description of most corporate EAI efforts.
The Gnome group seems to think they're smarter than me, and that if their system doesn't work with me, then I should look elsewhere, and so I have.
Agreed. Apple seems to have had this same attitude, too, at least in its early days. I said "in its early days," because when I see that attitude, I usually ignore the company from then on and have no idea if they have changed or not. There are always alternatives which have learned to listen to their customers.
The fact that they have had to go such great lengths to defend the utility of such a simple "innovation" really ought to tell the innovators something. Or would if they were capable of listening.
That's a nice explanation and truly appreciated. But I want to know what significance, if any, this has for any other discipline. I mean if the Riemann Hypothesis is true, does this imply that the Earth is flat, that spaceships can be built to fly at warp 6, or that George Bush will win reelection? Or is it all just a wonderfully fun problem which would be OK, too?
It is not necessarily the HD, but more likely some combo of PCI bus bandwidth limitations and memory size. The burner needs a steady stream of supplied data or it will just create a coaster. The faster the burn rate and the more data to burn, the more likely that something will stall the process. But if 52x write speeds work with CDs, I'd expect 52x to work with DVDs eventually as long as the computer isn't doing anything else and has enough memory to provide a sufficient buffer.
And which glibc are they using? IIRC glibc 2.3.2 is not compatible with gcc 3.4 and glibc 2.3.3 has not yet been released. Last month I tried to build an LFS w/ gcc 3.4 and a cvs version of glibc 2.3.3 w/ several patches available from glibc bugzilla. Everything built, but many of the glibc and binutils tests failed. There were also trivial incompatibilities building several of the base programs with gcc 3.4. Does Mandrake have a standard place for obtaining their patches against the base gnu code?
GE/GM crops are just allowing us to add factors that would normally take millenia to add.
And in a decade or so could possibly wreck the kind of ecological destruction that would normally take millenia as well. Sticking genes from one species into another is not at all the same thing as selectively breeding a single species for desirable traits.
Gigabit ethernet needs a faster bus than the current PCI. PCI bandwidth is just a hair over 1 Gb/sec.
Why do I need Vonage to use VoIP? At present, the only reason is that Vonage can route my calls from the net to the PSTN and verse visa. But as more people start using VoIP and fewer use the PSTN, then the need for Vonage will gradually vanish. All VoIP will need is a directory mechanism for user lookups. After that, VoIP is no different than http, ftp, smtp, etc. Its just another protocol and anyone can run it without needing anything more than access to the net. Vonage is like a parasite that can't afford to kill its host because then it would kill itself.
Never substitute anecdotes for actual measurements. Weighted average fuel efficiency in Europe is ~= 30 MPG. In the US it is 20.1 MPG. European fuel efficiency has been declining, but it is still 50% better than the US. Further, in the 1970s after the first gas crisis, there was a very measurable jump in average fuel efficiency in the US.
Full disclosure: I used to teach environmental economics and covered this material in some depth.
Documentary: A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.
I don't see anything in that definition that says one has to cover all sides of an issue to make a documentary. I also don't recall Moore ever describing himself as a journalist.
From the NYT:
"I did not set out to make a political film," Mr. Moore said at a news conference after the ceremony. "I want people to leave thinking that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics."
As it should be. The very best documentaries are at least as much art as they are a recitation of facts. I mean I can only watch the History Channel or Bob Woodward for so long before getting bored with whatever they are documenting this afternoon.
Science is fun, but it can also be very dangerous... Be safe
My father once caught me making gunpowder using a chem lab kit he'd bought me and an old mortar I'd found in the garage. His first reaction was "Idiot kid!" Then it was "Oh, wait, that's what I used that mortar for when I was a kid. Let me show you how to do it safely." Basically wet the ingredients down so it doesn't accidentally catch fire while you are grinding it. I suspect he'd learned that one the hard way. I'm big on the safety angle with my kids now, too. In my case its a result of an experiment with some gasoline and an Estes rocket engine when I was a teenager.
I got so addicted to the taste of fresh roasted coffe, I started roasting it at home in a cast iron skillet. Gave it up after a few months because it was too much work and made the house smell of roasting coffee (which doesn't smell nearly as nice as brewing coffee.)
Try using a hot air popcorn popper. Works great. I've also used a hand-cranked basket affair over a gas stove, but that is too much work.
Interesting reply! Thanks!
My gp comment was directed soley at the jury nullification issue and was not intended to address the ggp's views on challanges. But since you asked ;), as long as both sides have equal rights to challange potential jurors, I don't see what the problem is here. Of course IANAL and likely neither are you so I doubt either of us really has much understanding of the legal theory behind jury challanges or how they work in practice.
Second, there is the question of jury nullification. Judges and prosecutors seldom inform juries of their right and responsibility to return a "not guilty" verdict if they feel that the law does not reflect the values of the community or has not been applied appropriately.
Is this what Southern juries did in the 1960s when they aquitted KKK members of murder charges involving lynchings of African-Americans? Jury nullification sounds good as a check on tyranny until you realize that it is just as likely to be used as an instrument of tyranny by a majority bent on depriving a minority of their rights.
you overlooked the fact that the FBI's subpoenas (even the secret ones) have to be reviewed by a judge and often a grand jury.
But what if they don't need a subpoena?
and perhaps most significantly, you seem unaware that the activities of the FBI are overseen by Senators and Representatives that you and I vote for
Oh sure, I trust the other branches of the Gov't to oversee the FBI.
The problem is that Congressional and Court oversight usually waits until things have gotten so far out of control that they can't duck their responsibility. By which time many innocent people have been hurt. I call the current stupidity in Iraq (ICRC pdf - sorry) as my first witness and Frank Church as my second.
Your significantly more paranoid friend (who has worked for two out of three branches of the Federal Gov't).
So apply the tax to retail gas and diesel but not diesel sold for use in semi-trucks.
No. You're wrong. A jump in the gas tax would convince many people to stop driving gas guzzling SUVs and start driving subcompacts. Few people need to drive an SUV to work. In fact, one of the reasons that the Japanese did such a thorough number on the American auto industry in the 1970s was that when the first gas crisis hit, the Japanese had subcompacts for sale while the Americans continued to produce gas guzzling boats. Price matters.
The notion that this would automatically effect diesel prices for truck and rail transport is also nonsence. It would be trivial to structure the tax so that it applied to retail gasoline only.
Further, the idea that you should build the public transport systems first before implementing a gas tax is just reinforcing previous years of bad policy decisions. It smacks of a "If you build it, they will use it" attitude. We have lots of unused public transport in most major US cities. Some places like NYC and Wash, DC have great public systems that are well used. But that is usually because the alternative invloves high commuting time and bridge and parking tolls -- i.e private transport has a high cost, exactly what a gas tax would achieve. Lets convince people to use what is already available and use gas tax revenues to expand those systems after we can show that people are using them.
Why wouldn't it be meaningful?
Today's problem won't run on today's hardware, only on tomorrows'. I can only solve yesterday's problem on today's hardware. By waiting until tomorrow, I'll have the hardware to solve today's problem, but that problem won't be interesting tomorrow, it is only interesting today. Waiting only allows one to solve uninteresting problems. Q.E.D.
Except in this case it probably was accidental. Caeser got into a major fight in Alexandria and the docks where much of the library material was stored caught fire. Here is one scholars attempt to uncover who was guilty of destroying the library.
Although you are right that many conquerers did deliberately destroy the writings of the conquered (e.g. the Spanish in Mesoamerica), I suspect that more often such libraries were destroyed because the conquerers didn't know or care what a library was (e.g. the Mongol destruction of Baghdad's library or, more recently, Rumsfeld's neglect in Baghdad -- I wonder what librarian Laura Bush thought about the untidiness of U.S. forces standing by while an ancient library burned?).
The current problem of interest is always too large to run on the current generation of hardware. Better bang/$ simply means that a more difficult problem will suddenly become enticing. It isn't only numerical computing that suffers from this effect. Look at the way accelerator physicists always seem to need a bigger machine, astronomers a more powerful telescope, or biologists faster DNA sequencers. If the problem set were always static, then slacktitude might be meaningful. But the problem set is always expanding.