"Does a NULL mean that you don't know the hourly wage or that the person doesn't have one?). But this is largely a db design issue and not an inherent issue with NULLs per se."
If you don't know what a NULL represents, I'd say that's a problem with the theory, not a design issue.
"Lets say there is more information I need about this contact for my relational model but I forget to gather it at this time (lets say, zip code)."
This is reasoning backward. You're assuming your relational model (or more importantly in this case, the IMPLEMENTATION of that model) is correct, and you need nulls to represent missing data. Maybe you don't. Maybe you need an implementation that allows for missing data without using NULLS. That's the issue.
I myself don't have enough relational theory knowledge yet to decide how that might be done, but apparently Date and Darwen and the people who invented the TRM model have figured out ways that work. How well they work is an open question since they're not being used on a wide scale because none of the existing DBMS systems implement them. A chicken-and-egg situation.
This is why Date, Pascal, and others are frustrated - without an implementation, they can't prove their correctness is implementable, and none of the major DBMS vendors give a shit about correctness so they won't implement what needs to be implemented to prove it works. If Required Technologies had taken off, it might have been able to do that, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen at the moment.
"most of the arguments fall down in the face of implementation considerations"
Well, correctness is indeed more important than implementation considerations. The point of the TRM system was to deal with implementation issues while preserving the correctness of relational models.
"typically bad to sacrifice simplicity for the sake of theoretical correctness"
Wrong. Theoretical correctness frequently leads to simplicity because it deals with all the issues and doesn't let things fall through the cracks - where they then lead to complexities in dealing with them.
As for NULLs, I don't the relational theory background yet to make a decision. I suspect they are not necessary in any situation, provided that the database design is correct, but I can't prove that yet as I haven't read all the arguments.
I think you'll find that the issue of correctness is preferred over concerns over storage space and performance.
The point of the TRM system was to address the latter issues while maintaining correctness of the relational model.
I'm not clear enough myself on NULLs to determine whether or not they should exist. I suspect not, but I don't yet have the theoretical background to make that determination.
Date and Fabian Pascal have been fairly clear that it's an actual company - they've discussed the owner's name, which I don't recall, I'd have to look it up on my hard drive somewhere [Steve Tarin, apparently, is the inventor and owner, I've just looked it up].
According to Pascal, Date has seen a working implementation of the TRM, and is writing a book about it tentatively entitled "Go Faster! The Transrelational Approach to DBMS Implementation."
The company name is Required Technologies Inc., 39141 Civic Center Dr. Ste. 250, Fremont, CA 94538 Their Web site remain "under construction".
The patent for TRM is United States Patent 6,009,432. There is also the patent application: United States Patent Application 0010000536.
There is also a resume of one Vincent Poydenot who described his employment with Required Technologies as Vice-President of Software Development. He describes a 15-man development team which developed a full implementation for Windows NT 4.0 in Visual C++, with a port to Solaris and Linux.
"Not only had Date been exposed to a working TRM implementation - a prototype built by Required Technologies that included update and disk operations - but so have other highly respected database researchers and implementers. Moreover, several potential customers ran their own benchmarks against this prototype using their own real-world data and their own live complex queries. The results were extraordinary. In every case, TRM delivered orders-of-magnitude performance improvements over existing RDBMSs, in a large dynamic disk-based environment. These results can be demonstrated to anyone seriously interested in TRM....
Not only does the prototype implementation of TRM (referenced above) still exist, but also a full-blown commercial disk-based updatable RDBMS based on TRM (with standard SQL, ODBC, JDBC, and third-party tool interfaces, plus all standard subsystems) is nearly complete."
The above was as of January 2005. Back in late 2004 Pascal was describing "large transactional databases with subsecond response." Note that these were not in-memory databases but disk-based.
Apparently there is some legal or financial issue involved that is threatening the owner with "having his company taken away from him", according to one reference. They claim the guy has been fighting tooth and nail to resolve the issues, but there hasn't been any recent info.
I would have assumed the whole thing would have been resolved by now in most cases, unless the people involved are waiting for some court case.
I have now found a post on Curt Monash's blog whereupon he apparently - I say apparently because I have no idea whether his information is correct - debunks the entire project and the company: http://www.dbms2.com/category/memory-centric-data- management//
Fabian Pascal's response on Curt's blog:
Monash knows zilch about TRM. But then he knows zilch about RM too,and lack of knowldge has not stopped him ever before from generating crappola. In fact, he is not even aware of how ignorant he is.
Nonsense indeed, but the only one is from Monash.
Unskilled and unaware of it. Typical american. Comment by fabian pascal -- November 14, 2005 @ 12:41 pm
There follows a ton of incredibly acrimonious comments between Monash and Pascal in which both accuse the other of various incompeten
The problem is that if you are developing a database with multiple tables related to each other (MySQL DOES want to be considered a "relational" database rather than a mere "file handler"), then you have to have referential integrity (or waste time coding referential integrity yourself - I used to do that with FoxPro back in the day, and it's not fun.)
Most of the MySQL engines don't do referential integrity - which makes them worthless for most "real" database efforts. Only InnoDB enforces foreign key constraints.
If the current version of InnoDB in MySQL 5.x is under GPL, and MySQL AB can continue to develop their own fork, it may not be that big a problem. But if they can't, due to patent or other IP issues, MySQL is in big trouble. In fact, for any serious uses, they're history, and everybody would be advised to turn to PostgreSQL or Firebird - or even Ingres.
Firebird in particular is fast and small and would suit the sort of Web applications that MySQL is known for - except that there isn't much support in Firebird for that sort of thing - but it could be added on if people see the need due to MySQL becoming a liability.
An empty string is a value; a NULL is the absence of a value.
In fact, in relational theory, according to Chris Date (although Codd himself supported the concept to some degree), NULLs shouldn't exist. This is because a table expresses facts - logical expressions - about an entity or a relationship, and a NULL is not a fact, it is the absence of a fact. An entity or relation about which you do not know the relevant facts should not be in a table which expresses facts about that entity or relation.
NULLS also lead to screwed-up SELECT results sometimes and worse, sometimes you can't detect that the results are screwed up.
This usually produces a religious war discussion, and I don't know enough to argue the case either way, so I won't say anything more about it. I'll just say that with Codd dead, Chris Date is the main man when it comes to relational theory, as far as I can tell, and he makes a good argument against NULLS.
Pick up his book "Database in Depth" published by O'Reilly, which is not really a book for newbies, but does have some fairly clear explanations of the issues. It's smaller and cheaper (by about three-plus times - $30 vs $105) than his college textbook on the subject.
Actually, neither one of them implicates relational theory properly. Aside from the InnoDB engine, most of MySQL is pathetically incomplete. Without InnoDB, MySQL is worthless with regard to referential integrity, which is a showstopper for any database that requires multiple tables related to each other.
If the company building the Trans-Relational database ever gets off the ground (or failing that, goes open source), perhaps both of them (along with Sybase, SQL Server, Informix, and the OOP DBMSs) will be put out to pasture. The claimed capabilities of that system, implementing a very relationally complete system, would bury even Oracle eventually, if not immediately.
Anybody have any real background info on why the company developing the Transrelational system is having legal and/or financial trouble? Nothing concrete appears to be available on the DbDebunk site or via Google. The whole thing appears to have been hanging fire for a long time.
No, the number one reason businesses use Microsoft is because they're too stupid to "look under the hood", i.e., find out that they don't need to pay that kind of money for that kind of capability.
It has nothing to do with inspecting the code - it has to do with inspecting the MARKETPLACE and finding the lowest cost solution to business problems.
Which is why businesses get ripped off all the time from the rest of the industries you cite as well as Microsoft.
Which is why no company "trusts" any vendor - they pay and they sue when it doesn't work. Except nobody ever sues a software company, as Marcus Ranum has pointed out. They just want a software company so they can claim they CAN sue - when they actually never do, they just pour more good money after bad trying to make the crap software work, when it would have been far cheaper to take FREE software and make it work in the first place.
Amd that is precisely the problem with Microsoft and the business world today.
In other words, management are morons, and trying to justify their behavior vis-a-vis OSS is equally moronic.
I think the point should be made that, with Linux anyway, development is ongoing to the point where in five years it makes sense to upgrade the OS simply to take advantage of things like new scheduling algorithms.
A server doing something simple like serving Web pages which is not under heavy load can be kept as is and just patched, but mission-critical stuff should be patched as long as possible - until the patching itself becomes a risk of instability - then upgraded.
There is a tradeoff between upgrading and causing potential instabilities and patching which itself can cause instabilities.
And I think that tradeoff is less than five to seven years when the OS is under heavy development.
I'd say it is - after five to seven years, any OS is obsolete. At least it is if any development is still being done on it. Would you really run servers on seven-year-old Linux now? I can see running a simple server like Apache or something that simply doesn't change ever, but a mission-critical system that can't take advantage of any new performance features?
You'd run a 2.2 kernel instead of 2.6?
I think if your systems are that fragile, you need to replace them just for that reason alone.
The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" policy can be taken to extremes - and not upgrading a system for five years or more is an extreme. While it is a selling point for Linux that you don't HAVE to upgrade on Microsoft's schedule, it's still advisable to take advantage of new capabilities of the OS within a reasonable time frame. Seven years is not reasonable.
OTOH, you can patch a Linux system up to current without a wholesale re-install, but then that takes a lot of patching work and might tend to introduce instabilities itself that a wholesale reinstall might avoid.
I say, patch while you can and upgrade periodically on a reasonable schedule.
Then Windows users don't? What does that say about Windows users?
The usual/. knee-jerk, "what can I say to make a pointless point and raise my karma?"
The whole issue is pointless, since obviously in a production environment nothing should be installed that isn't needed. Anything installed is needed. The issue of how many patches are needed really isn't relevant since it's controlled by how much software is needed.
The difference between Windows and Linux is that Windows is monolithic. You may download more patches with Linux, but they are applied to disparate systems which are disparate for a REASON - namely, security and reliability. With Windows, you download one patch and it breaks five different systems. With Linux, you download one patch and it breaks one thing (unless it's the compiler or a critical library and you recompile everything under it.)
It's not the gun, moron, it's the balls to use it and the smarts to use it properly.
As for whether it's factually legal for me to own one, no, it isn't. The only issue in my mind is whether I could ever be CONNECTED to actually possessing one again. Anything else is irrelevant.
As for pathetic nonces, nigger bitches who boast about how big they are are a dime a dozen in the joint. And when a couple white guys roll in on them with lead pipes or shanks, it really doesn't matter how big they are - they're going out with blood on their skulls.
I have no idea what you're talking about with regard to raping anybody. The morons above were babbling about jailhouse sex, not me.
Monkeys who have to flex their muscles to threaten someone don't impress me - and people who are impressed by those monkeys don't impress me either. That was my point, which you evidently didn't comprehend.
Which is smarter? Working at McDonalds for minimum wage and living, or joining the military and dying? And what does it say about our military if everyone in it is such a loser they can't even get a job at McDonalds? The Iraq invasion force was estimated to be a quarter Latin immigrants promised a green card for enlisting! Go back and read the death notices during the invasion - almost ALL of them had Hispanic names! The Hispanics were sent to the infantry, while the officers were all WASPs (except for General Sanchez, a perfect example, like Colin Powell, of people willing to sell out their own nationality for a chance at power.)
Of course, someone could convince himself that he wouldn't die - and in fact, the odds are he won't, since armies are rarely wiped out, and the vast majority of soldiers aren't even wounded. But when you add in the rest of military life, you have to be a moron to choose it.
What's that debate "Law" that says you lose when you bring up Hitler?
Besides, the only Hitler comparison I see here is Bill Gates - even if Schmidt has the better name for it.
And Hitler didn't give us public relations - that was a corporate invention before him. Read your Noam Chomsky, I think he mentions it. Hitler himself despised the press for being lackeys of the establishment - until of course they were lackeys for him. Now they're lackeys for Israel - which means he's probably spinning in his grave - particularly since the Zionists preceded him in being advocates of "ethnic cleansing" (of Palestine.)
March 1967- March 1970 - Basic and AIT at Fort Jackson, transit to Cam Ranh Bay via Fort Lewis, nine months at Cam Ranh, three at Vung Ro Bay, back to the states to Fort Rucker, Alabama for the remainder of my time. Honorable discharge.
And fuck you very much for the question.
You're probably the same punk who wrote that idiot Senator questioning Representative Murtha's background...
"Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store."
In other words, folks, NOBODY BUYS MUSIC! They pay for the CONVENIENCE of accessing what they view as FREE music!
Sprint's price will prove to be too high, of course - the sweet spot has already been demonstrated by Apple to be "under a dollar".
But the point has now been made by a major corporation - NOBODY BUYS MUSIC!
The only reason people spend money for music is the CONVENIENCE. Only for the few decades when there was no ability to record music at home - i.e., during the early days of phonograph records and no tape recorders - did people EVER PAY for music. They paid to LISTEN to music - not the same thing at all! They paid to go to concerts, or clubs, or wherever an artist was performing.
People will pay for a performance by a live person since they know people don't work for free.
People will also pay for an object that lets them listen to music wherever and whenever they want - whether that's a cassette recording off the radio, or a ripped CD on an iPod.
But they will NOT pay for music itself!
Get a clue, music industry and artists! Change your business model!
Which is why I DON'T "support our troops" in Irag - since they're doing bad things on stupid orders for the benefit of traitors to the country.
Not to mention being morons for being in a military organization in the first place - and I say that after having been in the US Army for three years AND in Vietnam. Yes, I was a moron - WAS.)
But I doubt they can do better than McGoohan, who was the main force behind that show.
While the last two episodes were highly allegorical (and I still don't comprehend parts of them), there's no denying the significance of the last scene, as the door to his London apartment closes with the same sound as the door to his house in the Village...We are all in the Village at all times.
And of course, as a Transhuman, the significance of Number Six ripping off the mask of "Number One" and seeing, first an ape's face, and then his own, is hardly lost on me.
His words "Every man votes for a dictator" could not have been more prophetic after the last two elections and certainly apply to every other election as well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Does a NULL mean that you don't know the hourly wage or that the person doesn't have one?). But this is largely a db design issue and not an inherent issue with NULLs per se."
If you don't know what a NULL represents, I'd say that's a problem with the theory, not a design issue.
"Lets say there is more information I need about this contact for my relational model but I forget to gather it at this time (lets say, zip code)."
This is reasoning backward. You're assuming your relational model (or more importantly in this case, the IMPLEMENTATION of that model) is correct, and you need nulls to represent missing data. Maybe you don't. Maybe you need an implementation that allows for missing data without using NULLS. That's the issue.
I myself don't have enough relational theory knowledge yet to decide how that might be done, but apparently Date and Darwen and the people who invented the TRM model have figured out ways that work. How well they work is an open question since they're not being used on a wide scale because none of the existing DBMS systems implement them. A chicken-and-egg situation.
This is why Date, Pascal, and others are frustrated - without an implementation, they can't prove their correctness is implementable, and none of the major DBMS vendors give a shit about correctness so they won't implement what needs to be implemented to prove it works. If Required Technologies had taken off, it might have been able to do that, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen at the moment.
"most of the arguments fall down in the face of implementation considerations"
Well, correctness is indeed more important than implementation considerations. The point of the TRM system was to deal with implementation issues while preserving the correctness of relational models.
"typically bad to sacrifice simplicity for the sake of theoretical correctness"
Wrong. Theoretical correctness frequently leads to simplicity because it deals with all the issues and doesn't let things fall through the cracks - where they then lead to complexities in dealing with them.
As for NULLs, I don't the relational theory background yet to make a decision. I suspect they are not necessary in any situation, provided that the database design is correct, but I can't prove that yet as I haven't read all the arguments.
I think you'll find that the issue of correctness is preferred over concerns over storage space and performance.
The point of the TRM system was to address the latter issues while maintaining correctness of the relational model.
I'm not clear enough myself on NULLs to determine whether or not they should exist. I suspect not, but I don't yet have the theoretical background to make that determination.
Date and Fabian Pascal have been fairly clear that it's an actual company - they've discussed the owner's name, which I don't recall, I'd have to look it up on my hard drive somewhere [Steve Tarin, apparently, is the inventor and owner, I've just looked it up].
According to Pascal, Date has seen a working implementation of the TRM, and is writing a book about it tentatively entitled "Go Faster! The Transrelational Approach to DBMS Implementation."
The company name is Required Technologies Inc.,
39141 Civic Center Dr. Ste. 250, Fremont, CA 94538 Their Web site remain "under construction".
The patent for TRM is United States Patent 6,009,432. There is also the patent application: United States Patent Application 0010000536.
There is also a resume of one Vincent Poydenot who described his employment with Required Technologies as Vice-President of Software Development. He describes a 15-man development team which developed a full implementation for Windows NT 4.0 in Visual C++, with a port to Solaris and Linux.
Links for the above here http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/Relat ional/Implementations/Required_Technologies//
An ad for programmers to work for the company when they were apparently in New York is here:
http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t- 188697.html/
According to Pascal's DBdebunk Web site:
"Not only had Date been exposed to a working TRM implementation - a prototype built by Required Technologies that included update and disk operations - but so have other highly respected database researchers and implementers. Moreover, several potential customers ran their own benchmarks against this prototype using their own real-world data and their own live complex queries. The results were extraordinary. In every case, TRM delivered orders-of-magnitude performance improvements over existing RDBMSs, in a large dynamic disk-based environment. These results can be demonstrated to anyone seriously interested in TRM....
Not only does the prototype implementation of TRM (referenced above) still exist, but also a full-blown commercial disk-based updatable RDBMS based on TRM (with standard SQL, ODBC, JDBC, and third-party tool interfaces, plus all standard subsystems) is nearly complete."
The above was as of January 2005. Back in late 2004 Pascal was describing "large transactional databases with subsecond response." Note that these were not in-memory databases but disk-based.
Apparently there is some legal or financial issue involved that is threatening the owner with "having his company taken away from him", according to one reference. They claim the guy has been fighting tooth and nail to resolve the issues, but there hasn't been any recent info.
I would have assumed the whole thing would have been resolved by now in most cases, unless the people involved are waiting for some court case.
I have now found a post on Curt Monash's blog whereupon he apparently - I say apparently because I have no idea whether his information is correct - debunks the entire project and the company:
http://www.dbms2.com/category/memory-centric-data- management//
Fabian Pascal's response on Curt's blog:
Monash knows zilch about TRM. But then he knows zilch about RM too,and lack of knowldge has not stopped him ever before from generating crappola. In fact, he is not even aware of how ignorant he is.
Nonsense indeed, but the only one is from Monash.
Unskilled and unaware of it. Typical american.
Comment by fabian pascal -- November 14, 2005 @ 12:41 pm
There follows a ton of incredibly acrimonious comments between Monash and Pascal in which both accuse the other of various incompeten
Interesting. I wasn't aware of the back story. So MySQL was really intended to be a mere "file handler" from the start.
Explains a lot.
The problem is that if you are developing a database with multiple tables related to each other (MySQL DOES want to be considered a "relational" database rather than a mere "file handler"), then you have to have referential integrity (or waste time coding referential integrity yourself - I used to do that with FoxPro back in the day, and it's not fun.)
Most of the MySQL engines don't do referential integrity - which makes them worthless for most "real" database efforts. Only InnoDB enforces foreign key constraints.
If the current version of InnoDB in MySQL 5.x is under GPL, and MySQL AB can continue to develop their own fork, it may not be that big a problem. But if they can't, due to patent or other IP issues, MySQL is in big trouble. In fact, for any serious uses, they're history, and everybody would be advised to turn to PostgreSQL or Firebird - or even Ingres.
Firebird in particular is fast and small and would suit the sort of Web applications that MySQL is known for - except that there isn't much support in Firebird for that sort of thing - but it could be added on if people see the need due to MySQL becoming a liability.
An empty string is a value; a NULL is the absence of a value.
In fact, in relational theory, according to Chris Date (although Codd himself supported the concept to some degree), NULLs shouldn't exist. This is because a table expresses facts - logical expressions - about an entity or a relationship, and a NULL is not a fact, it is the absence of a fact. An entity or relation about which you do not know the relevant facts should not be in a table which expresses facts about that entity or relation.
NULLS also lead to screwed-up SELECT results sometimes and worse, sometimes you can't detect that the results are screwed up.
This usually produces a religious war discussion, and I don't know enough to argue the case either way, so I won't say anything more about it. I'll just say that with Codd dead, Chris Date is the main man when it comes to relational theory, as far as I can tell, and he makes a good argument against NULLS.
Pick up his book "Database in Depth" published by O'Reilly, which is not really a book for newbies, but does have some fairly clear explanations of the issues. It's smaller and cheaper (by about three-plus times - $30 vs $105) than his college textbook on the subject.
Actually, neither one of them implicates relational theory properly. Aside from the InnoDB engine, most of MySQL is pathetically incomplete. Without InnoDB, MySQL is worthless with regard to referential integrity, which is a showstopper for any database that requires multiple tables related to each other.
If the company building the Trans-Relational database ever gets off the ground (or failing that, goes open source), perhaps both of them (along with Sybase, SQL Server, Informix, and the OOP DBMSs) will be put out to pasture. The claimed capabilities of that system, implementing a very relationally complete system, would bury even Oracle eventually, if not immediately.
Anybody have any real background info on why the company developing the Transrelational system is having legal and/or financial trouble? Nothing concrete appears to be available on the DbDebunk site or via Google. The whole thing appears to have been hanging fire for a long time.
Knives, eh?
Don't forget this is SLASHdot!
Oh, man, I can't believe I said that...
Since you've obviously replaced your brain with
No, the number one reason businesses use Microsoft is because they're too stupid to "look under the hood", i.e., find out that they don't need to pay that kind of money for that kind of capability.
It has nothing to do with inspecting the code - it has to do with inspecting the MARKETPLACE and finding the lowest cost solution to business problems.
Which is why businesses get ripped off all the time from the rest of the industries you cite as well as Microsoft.
Which is why no company "trusts" any vendor - they pay and they sue when it doesn't work. Except nobody ever sues a software company, as Marcus Ranum has pointed out. They just want a software company so they can claim they CAN sue - when they actually never do, they just pour more good money after bad trying to make the crap software work, when it would have been far cheaper to take FREE software and make it work in the first place.
Amd that is precisely the problem with Microsoft and the business world today.
In other words, management are morons, and trying to justify their behavior vis-a-vis OSS is equally moronic.
I think the point should be made that, with Linux anyway, development is ongoing to the point where in five years it makes sense to upgrade the OS simply to take advantage of things like new scheduling algorithms.
A server doing something simple like serving Web pages which is not under heavy load can be kept as is and just patched, but mission-critical stuff should be patched as long as possible - until the patching itself becomes a risk of instability - then upgraded.
There is a tradeoff between upgrading and causing potential instabilities and patching which itself can cause instabilities.
And I think that tradeoff is less than five to seven years when the OS is under heavy development.
Obviously YMMV, but I think the concept is sound.
I'd say it is - after five to seven years, any OS is obsolete. At least it is if any development is still being done on it. Would you really run servers on seven-year-old Linux now? I can see running a simple server like Apache or something that simply doesn't change ever, but a mission-critical system that can't take advantage of any new performance features?
You'd run a 2.2 kernel instead of 2.6?
I think if your systems are that fragile, you need to replace them just for that reason alone.
The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" policy can be taken to extremes - and not upgrading a system for five years or more is an extreme. While it is a selling point for Linux that you don't HAVE to upgrade on Microsoft's schedule, it's still advisable to take advantage of new capabilities of the OS within a reasonable time frame. Seven years is not reasonable.
OTOH, you can patch a Linux system up to current without a wholesale re-install, but then that takes a lot of patching work and might tend to introduce instabilities itself that a wholesale reinstall might avoid.
I say, patch while you can and upgrade periodically on a reasonable schedule.
Then Windows users don't? What does that say about Windows users?
The usual
The whole issue is pointless, since obviously in a production environment nothing should be installed that isn't needed. Anything installed is needed. The issue of how many patches are needed really isn't relevant since it's controlled by how much software is needed.
The difference between Windows and Linux is that Windows is monolithic. You may download more patches with Linux, but they are applied to disparate systems which are disparate for a REASON - namely, security and reliability. With Windows, you download one patch and it breaks five different systems. With Linux, you download one patch and it breaks one thing (unless it's the compiler or a critical library and you recompile everything under it.)
It's not the gun, moron, it's the balls to use it and the smarts to use it properly.
As for whether it's factually legal for me to own one, no, it isn't. The only issue in my mind is whether I could ever be CONNECTED to actually possessing one again. Anything else is irrelevant.
As for pathetic nonces, nigger bitches who boast about how big they are are a dime a dozen in the joint. And when a couple white guys roll in on them with lead pipes or shanks, it really doesn't matter how big they are - they're going out with blood on their skulls.
I have no idea what you're talking about with regard to raping anybody. The morons above were babbling about jailhouse sex, not me.
Monkeys who have to flex their muscles to threaten someone don't impress me - and people who are impressed by those monkeys don't impress me either. That was my point, which you evidently didn't comprehend.
Why invent insults when there are perfectly good ones ready to hand everywhere?
Open source insults!
Which is smarter? Working at McDonalds for minimum wage and living, or joining the military and dying? And what does it say about our military if everyone in it is such a loser they can't even get a job at McDonalds? The Iraq invasion force was estimated to be a quarter Latin immigrants promised a green card for enlisting! Go back and read the death notices during the invasion - almost ALL of them had Hispanic names! The Hispanics were sent to the infantry, while the officers were all WASPs (except for General Sanchez, a perfect example, like Colin Powell, of people willing to sell out their own nationality for a chance at power.)
Of course, someone could convince himself that he wouldn't die - and in fact, the odds are he won't, since armies are rarely wiped out, and the vast majority of soldiers aren't even wounded. But when you add in the rest of military life, you have to be a moron to choose it.
I did, so I know - because I learned.
What's that debate "Law" that says you lose when you bring up Hitler?
Besides, the only Hitler comparison I see here is Bill Gates - even if Schmidt has the better name for it.
And Hitler didn't give us public relations - that was a corporate invention before him. Read your Noam Chomsky, I think he mentions it. Hitler himself despised the press for being lackeys of the establishment - until of course they were lackeys for him. Now they're lackeys for Israel - which means he's probably spinning in his grave - particularly since the Zionists preceded him in being advocates of "ethnic cleansing" (of Palestine.)
March 1967- March 1970 - Basic and AIT at Fort Jackson, transit to Cam Ranh Bay via Fort Lewis, nine months at Cam Ranh, three at Vung Ro Bay, back to the states to Fort Rucker, Alabama for the remainder of my time. Honorable discharge.
And fuck you very much for the question.
You're probably the same punk who wrote that idiot Senator questioning Representative Murtha's background...
"Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store."
In other words, folks, NOBODY BUYS MUSIC! They pay for the CONVENIENCE of accessing what they view as FREE music!
Sprint's price will prove to be too high, of course - the sweet spot has already been demonstrated by Apple to be "under a dollar".
But the point has now been made by a major corporation - NOBODY BUYS MUSIC!
The only reason people spend money for music is the CONVENIENCE. Only for the few decades when there was no ability to record music at home - i.e., during the early days of phonograph records and no tape recorders - did people EVER PAY for music. They paid to LISTEN to music - not the same thing at all! They paid to go to concerts, or clubs, or wherever an artist was performing.
People will pay for a performance by a live person since they know people don't work for free.
People will also pay for an object that lets them listen to music wherever and whenever they want - whether that's a cassette recording off the radio, or a ripped CD on an iPod.
But they will NOT pay for music itself!
Get a clue, music industry and artists! Change your business model!
Hmmm...Somebody has discovered my business plan.
/. - nobody will care.
Prepare to be terminated.
Naah, why bother. You posted on
Correct.
Which is why I DON'T "support our troops" in Irag - since they're doing bad things on stupid orders for the benefit of traitors to the country.
Not to mention being morons for being in a military organization in the first place - and I say that after having been in the US Army for three years AND in Vietnam. Yes, I was a moron - WAS.)
Microsoft has DEMONSTRATED they don't give a shit about anything but money - not advancing technology, not about customers, nothing but money.
Google at least APPEARS to be trying to improve technology FOR its customers.
Whether they will be successful at that, and how they will use that in the future is an open question.
But I doubt they can do better than McGoohan, who was the main force behind that show.
While the last two episodes were highly allegorical (and I still don't comprehend parts of them), there's no denying the significance of the last scene, as the door to his London apartment closes with the same sound as the door to his house in the Village...We are all in the Village at all times.
And of course, as a Transhuman, the significance of Number Six ripping off the mask of "Number One" and seeing, first an ape's face, and then his own, is hardly lost on me.
His words "Every man votes for a dictator" could not have been more prophetic after the last two elections and certainly apply to every other election as well.
I'm not sure the Earth is, but /. certainly seems to be most days...a vortex of morons.